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Tyger of Wrath

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Morton D. Paley
Morton D. Paley*
Affiliation:
University or California, Berkeley
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Extract

      In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
      As modest stillness and humility,
      But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
      Then imitate the action of the tiger:
      Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
      Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage;
      Then lend the eye a terrible aspect:
      Let it cry through the portage of the head
      Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
      As fearfully as doth a galled rock
      O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
      Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.
      Henry V in.i.3-14
How would an ideal contemporary reader of Blake—one of those “Young Men of the New Age” whom he addressed in Milton—have regarded “The Tyger”? To such a reader certain aspects of the poem which modern critics have ignored would be obvious. In the rhetoric and imagery of the poem he would recognize an example of the sublime, appropriately Hebrew and terrifying. He would recollect analogues to the wrath of the Tyger in the Old Testament Prophets and in Revelation, and being an ideal reader, he would not need to be reminded that Blake elsewhere views the French Revolution as an eschatological event. He would also know that Blake characteristically thought of divine wrath as an expression of what Jakob Boehme calls the First Principle. His understanding of the poem would thus be affected by his connecting it with the sublime, the Bible, and Boehme. We later readers may also discover something about the meaning of “The Tyger” by considering it in relation to these traditions. That such an approach has something new and valuable to offer will be seen if we begin with what has previously been said about the poem.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 7 , December 1966 , pp. 540 - 551
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 See F. W. Bateson, Wordsworth, A Re-Interpretation (London, 1954), p. 133; and Selected Poems of William Blake (New York, 1957), p. 116. Professor Bateson has informed me that the handwriting may be Dorothy Wordsworth's.

2 See letter of 12 February 1818. Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford, 1959), iv, 836-838.

3 Letter of 15 May 1824. The Letters of Charles Lamb & Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (New Haven, 1935), ii, 424-427. For Blake's reputation among his contemporaries, see Geoffrey Keynes, “Blake with Lamb and His Circle,” Blake Studies (London, 1949), pp. 84-104.

4 London, 1806. The child, who died young, had been a drawing pupil of Blake's. Malkin's comment on “The Tyger” (see below) is slight, but his judicious remarks on some of the other poems entitle him to be considered the first Blake critic.

5 See Arthur Symons, William Blake (London, 1907), pp. 278-279.

6 Symons, p. 393.

7 S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (New York, 1947) [first published 1924], p. 276.

8 London, i, 119.

9 A Father's Memoir, p. xxxvii.

10 London, 1868, p. 120. For Blake's actual spelling and punctuation, see The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. a (London, 1966), pp. 172, 173, 214. This edition will hereafter be cited as K.

11 Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats, The Works of William Blake (London, 1893), ii, 14.

12 P. 277.

13 Blake's Innocence and Experience (London, 1928), pp. 196, 212.

14 William Blake: The Politics of Vision (New York, 1946), pp. 250-251.

15 Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954), pp. 179-180. Erdman, like Schorer, regards the questions of the poem as rhetorical. Gardner, Infinity on the Anvil (Oxford, 1954), pp. 123-130. Nurmi, “Blake's Revisions of The Tyger,” PMLA, lxxi (1956), 669-685. Bateson, Selected Poems of William Blake, pp. 117-119. Price, To the Palace of Wisdom (Garden City, N. Y.), 1964, pp. 398-400.

16 Frye, “Blake After Two Centuries,” UTQ, xxvii (1957), 12. Adams, William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle, 1963), p. 73. Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard (Detroit, 1959), pp. 275-290. Grant (ed.), Discussions of William Blake (Boston, 1961), p. 75. Miner, “‘The Tyger’: Genesis and Evolution in the Poetry of William Blake,” Criticism, iv (1962), 59–73. Hirsch, Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (New Haven, 1964), pp. 244-252. Hobsbaum, “A Rhetorical Question Answered: Blake's Tyger and Its Critics,” Neophilologus, xlviii (1964), 151-155.

17 Blake's A pocalypse (Garden City, N. Y., 1963), pp. 137-138.

18 William Blake, p. 65.

19 “Who Made the Tyger?” Encounter, ii (1955), 48, 43.

20 This passage from Jeremiah is cited in connection with “The Tyger” by Erdman, p. 181 n. A. J. Hescbel writes in The Prophets (New York and Evanston, 1962, p. 116): “The divine word moved in Jeremiah as fire because he lived through the experience of divine wrath. Just as the pathetic wrath of God could become a physical fire of destruction, so the wrathful word of the prophet could work itself out as a destructive fiery element.”

21 Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Etc., ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester and London, 1922), p. 6.

22 The Threefold Life of Man, Part 7, sections 62, 63, 65, 66, The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher (London, 1764-81), ii, 76.

23 Aurora, Part 11, section 92, Works of Jacob Behmen, I, 99.

24 “An Appeal,” Selected Mystical Writings of William Law, ed. Stephen Hobhouse (New York, 1948), p. 46.

25 The picture is reproduced in Damon's A Blake Dictionary (Providence, R.I., 1965), Pl. xi; Damon's interesting descriptive commentary is on pp. 183-184.

26 I should note that Gerald E. Bentley, Jr., suggests, without going further into this subject, that “The question of ‘The Tyger’ is whether the wrath principle and the love principle emanate from the same eternal being.”—“William Blake and the Alchemical Philosophers,” diss. (Merton College, Oxford, 1954), p. 216.

27 Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958), p. 58.

28 The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, Md., 1939), i, 362.

29 Enquiry, p. 39.

30 See Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960), pp. 79-80.

31 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, p. 361.

32 Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (London, 1787), i, 379-381.

33 1, 363. Jer. xxv.30, Hos. xiii.7, 8. My own Biblical citations are from the Authorized Version, but in an instance such as this one where the author provides his own translation, I reproduce the text as he gives it, unless otherwise noted.

34 Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime (London, 1743), p. 127.

35 Cf. Coleridge's “Sublimity is Hebrew by birth,” quoted by Monk, p. 79 n.

36 See Nurmi, p. 671 n.

37 Erdman suggests a possible indirect connection between the two through a paraphrase in James Hervey's Theron and Aspasio (1775)—Blake, p. 103.

38 K. 214. In one copy of the Songs, 1. 12 was altered to “What dread hand Form'd thy dread feet?” (Copy P, in Geoffrey Keynes and Edwin Wolf, William Blake's Illuminated Books: A Census, New York, 1953, p. 61). Malkin printed the line as “What dread hand forged thy dread feet?” Damon, William Blake, p. 279, thinks this emendation was Blake's own. Bateson, Selected Poems, p. 118, notes that “forged” is the reading in Wordsworth's Commonplace Book.

39 The Works of Edward Young, D.D. (London, 1813), ii, 204. See also Lowth, i, 357.

40 Quoted by Josephine Miles in Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), p. 66; from On the Idea of Universal Poetry, The Works of Richard Hurd, D.D., ii (London, 1811), 9.

41 K. 164 (“Poems from the Note-Book 1793”). Deleted lines omitted.

42 Quoted by Asa Briggs in The Age of Improvement (London, 1960), pp. 134-135.

43 The Prelude (1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1959), p. 370. For the date of composition of “The Tyger” (fall of 1792), see Erdman, pp. 167 n. and 174; Nurmi, p. 671 n.

44 See my “Method and Meaning in Blake's Booh of Ahania,” BNYPL, lxx (1966), 27-33.

45 “But when he [Virgil, in Aeneid vi] says that all the middle regions are covered with woods, this likewise plainly intimates a material nature …”—The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (New York, 1875), p. 20. See George Mills Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1961), pp. 157 and 169.

46 Explicalor, viii, #39.

47 Cf. Jerusalem, 55: 27, where “The Stars in their courses fought,” (K. 686), echoing Judges v.20. Several lines after this, the Eternals name the Eighth Eye of God, but “he came not, he hid in Albion's Forests” (33). In this later phase of his thought, Blake believes that the destructive wrath of revolution should be restrained; therefore the Words of the Eternals are described as “Curbing their Tygers with golden bits & bridles of silver & ivory” (35).

48 K. 311. See Erdman, p. 178.

49 Written in 1794. The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, 1912), p. 121.

50 Selected Writings, ed. Jolande Jacobi (New York, 1958), p. 154.

51 Quoted in Henry M. Pachter, Paracelsus: Magic Into Science (New York, 1957), p. 107.

52 The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1931), ii, i, 30.

53 P. 168, from Rights of Man (London, 1791), 4th ed., p. 26.

54 As noted by Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca, N. Y.), p. 238.

55 This similarity is discussed in my Brown Univ. master's thesis, “William Blake's Revolutionary Symbolism” (1957), p. 7, and in Miner, “ ‘The Tyger’,” pp. 67-68.

56 “Concerning the Spirits of the Planets,” The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus, ed. A. E. Waite (London, 1894), i, 85,74.

57 The Threefold Life of Man, 1849, p. 194.

58 Cf. the “Christ the tiger” of Eliot's “Gerontion,” in which several other lines also recall Blake:

Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.