The Tyger Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

The stuffy way of talking about form and meter in "The Tyger" is to say it's written in six quatrains of rhyming couplets with a pulsing, steady, mostly-trochaic rhythm. OK, now is the time to ask,...

In typical Blake fashion, the speaker is of this poem is really, really hard to pin down. Let’s take this one step at a time and not bite off more than we can chew. Deal? Deal.First of all, t...

The setting of "The Tyger," or at least the worlds this poem seems to conjure up, are extremely varied. In general, though, it takes place in the abstract, without much more than "Forests of the ni...

This poem sounds like a creepy, druidic chant. Think Stonehenge, fire, candles, darkness, and people in cloaks and hoods, chanting this poem in really deep voices. Not only does the rhythm and rhym...

The title is deceptively simple: it lets us know that the poem is about a tiger. So, we expect it to be just that, about a tiger. However, as we start reading, it becomes clear pretty quickly that...

Questioning a higher power! Blake is ALL about questioning, satirizing, lambasting, and often outright attacking the notion of a kind and generous, all-powerful (Christian) God. While "The Tyger" r...

"The Tyger" has plain language, and isn’t particularly hard to read, but the themes are subtle and hard to nail down. It’s not as difficult as some of Blake’s other stuff, which s...

We think "sinews of the heart" is pretty sexy, and there are definitely some beating hearts in this poem (check out line 11). Mr. Blake certainly knows how to get our attention with words like "fur...

William Blake: "The Lamb," (Line 20), refers to a poem with that title from Blake’s collection Songs of Innocence.