The Forests of the Night the war as it really was, as James Kirkup observed, an "acid portrait of those who played at being members of the [French] Resistance". The novel's theme and title come from the opening lines to William Blake's poem "The Tyger": "Tiger, tiger, burning bright - in the forests of the night." "The Forests of the Night" was translated in 1951 into English by Nora Wydenbruck; it has not been re-printed since. Francis is the son of the Comte de Balansun, whose family resides in the French town of Saint-Clar, near the Pyrenees. Francis, in the beginning of the novel, skips
The Tyger follows the metrical pattern of its first line and can be scanned as trochaic tetrameter catalectic. A number of lines, however, such as line four in the first stanza, fall into iambic tetrameter. "The Tyger" lacks narrative movement. The first stanza opens the central question, "What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Here the direct address to the creature becomes most obvious, but certainly, "the Tyger" cannot provide the lyrical "I" with a satisfactory answer, so the contemplation continues. The second stanza questions "the Tyger" about where he was created; the third about how the creator