The openings of William Blake's two best-known poems seem to affirm his strong religious belief in an all-powerful creator-God and a universally redeeming Christ respectively. And yet grammatically these openings are questions, which remain unanswered throughout the remainders of their respective poems. ‘The Tyger’ simply piles up further questions, bringing out the apparent impossibility of creating the terrifyingly alive tiger as if it were some piece of machinery, and the lyric best known as ‘Jerusalem’ only answers its opening questions by resolving to realize their vision in a future when we will indeed have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.

Repeatedly with Blake's poetry, passages which sound and feel direct and simple instantly develop complexities of this or other kinds when we ask ourselves either what they literally mean or what he means by saying them. In current language, his poetry is immensely ‘dialogic’: engaged in often impassioned debate with positions we can only glimpse via the stance Blake adopts towards them.