Topic > The Tyger Poem Analysis - 2183

Four of the poems The Lamb, The Piano, Baby Tortoise and War Photographer express a rather profound positive affect, albeit in different ways (The Tyger more than anything expresses an overwhelming feeling of awe.) With War Photographer and Education for Leisure the emotions probably reflect the greater complexities of the time. The War Photographer character faces the moral dilemma of photographing dying war victims. Through the poem's description, the reader is challenged to consider the emotional and moral tensions felt by the photographer, as well as question the public's attitude towards the suffering seen in the mass media. With War Photographer the relative simplicity of emotion in the poems of Blake and DH Lawrence has been left far behind. With Education for Leisure, which is actually about hatred, megalomania and even the effect of celebrity culture, we are now even further from the poems of Blake and Lawrence than the war photographer is. However, what unites all these poems are feelings of great intensity. The Tyger is part of a collection called "Songs of Experience". In “The Tyger” Blake writes about an idea about the creation of evil. “The Tiger” is the opposite of “The Lamb,” because instead of writing about the creation of good, he writes about the creation of evil. The poem itself presents a kind of more complex view on a central issue that he repeats twice in the poem referring to the evil of the tiger. “Who could/dare to frame your fearful symmetry?” The poem is full of rhetorical questions. One way Blake shows emotion is through the use of rhymes and trochees which are then emphasized by alliteration such as "burning bright", "distant depths", "what wings" and "Tyge... in the center of the card.. ." ....amb written in 1794, The Piano and the Little Turtle from about the 1920s and War Photographer and Leisure Education in the 1980s), are in a sense united by common emotions. However, we can see in the six poems a clear change in society and its concerns. In "The Tyger" and "The Lamb", Blake's main concerns are religious while in "The Piano" and "The Baby Tortoise" we see a move away from religious concerns towards more personal concerns with Baby Tortoise, particularly the move away from religion is quite extreme and obviously deeply influenced by the work of Charles Darwin. When we come to War Photographer and Education for Leisure there is a gulf between these two poems and Blake's. The primary concern in Carol Ann Duffy is social and The Tyger's evil is not generalized but embodied in War and the first-person narrator in Education for Leisure.