tyger

William Blake structured his poem with six Quatrains, or four line stanzas. In these stanzas, he uses a variety of rhyming couplets, repition, powerful imagery and alot of rhetorical questions to enhance the piece.
He begins the first quatrain with “Tyger! Tyger!burning bright.” Right away he uses repition to catch the reader’s eye. The word “Tyger” is a symbol of all creation. In his poem, “The Lamb”, he uses the Lamb as a symbol of innocent mankind, where as the “Tyger” is a much more wild, mysterious and ferocious animal capable of great good and terrifying evil. Blake then supports that idea by describing the Tyger as “Burning Bright” The burning bright meaning being so ferocious, being so capable, so intelligent, and having the power to do anything. Going along with the idea of the Tyger being a wild, mysterious creature, he uses powerful imagery with the line “In the forests of the night.” This imagery creats an awesome scene of a dark, mysterious environment in which the Tyger is lurking. This suggests that the Tyger is like a creature of the night, very dark, very mysterious, and again, capable of doing unknown goods and evils. Blake ends his first quatrain with a rhetorical question. “what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The immortal hand or eye Blake uses is referring to a God. So he is saying, what God could create or “frame” somethin g that is both beautiful, symmetrical, and also so terrifying and fearful. The God who created such a creature is fearful because he made this beautiul creature of mankind to have free will. With free will means that they can choose to do right and wrong, and that in intself is terrifying.
Blake begins the second quatrain of the piece with some imagery as well as another rhetorical question. “In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thing eyes?” By the terms distand deeps or skies, Blake is using an allusion to create a picture of Heaven and Hell. The line “Burnt the fire of thine eyes” is