In fact, the purple and golden colours of Blake’s big cat make it a dream creature, one that is not quite real. His picture is much more cuddly than the words beside it suggest. Some people find fault with Blake’s art, as opposed to his poetry. Blake makes us see how much of ourselves we would lose if we lost the tiger – for its existence fulfills a need in the human imagination a tiger in the mind. This is no secret, but still the desperate plight of this most marvellous creature continues. There may be as few as 3,200 wild tigers left in the world. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 97% of the tiger population has been lost in the last 100 years. It is exactly because tigers are so utterly wild and “fearful”, the very definition of all in nature that humans can never tame or patronise, that their extinction in the wild would be the worst of all ecological tragedies. He is a Romantic, and The Tyger is the perfect Romantic beast. But for Blake this cruelty is inherent in nature’s wonder. A few decades later, Charles Darwin would map the dynamism, creativity and inbuilt destructiveness of the natural world and point to a reality too cruel for any benign god to have created. Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?įor Blake, the tiger’s existence questions the idea of a benevolent creator, for the god that made this beast must have an appetite for violence and amoral energy:ĭid he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?Ī true love of nature, Blake shows, means accepting and revering the tiger as well as the lamb. To lose such a creature in the wild would be to lose the miracle of strangeness, otherness, and inhuman grandeur that filled Blake with wonder: Tigers are infinitely precious and terribly threatened. We have to preserve nature not just as a decoration, but a thing bigger than ourselves. We have to save animals that want to destroy us. This is why his poem so matters today, when tigers are close to extinction in their natural habitat. For Blake it is not the beauty but the ferocity of the tiger that makes it a miracle of nature. (He’s certainly inspired a band or two – The Doors took their name from his words.) In The Tyger, he combines a childlike portrait of the most beautiful and dangerous of cats with verses that contemplate this creature – still a near myth to Europeans in the 18th century – as an image of all that is sublime in nature. There is no other work of art that so urgently and universally tells the truth about nature and our relationship with it as Blake’s illuminated poem, which first appeared in 1794 in his brightly coloured book Songs of Experience.īlake is simultaneously a poet and artist – very contemporary.
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