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 says to begin to wonder about the tiger, and its nature, can only lead to a daring to wonder about it. Blake achieves great power through the use of alliteration ("frame" and "fearful") combined with imagery (burning, fire, eyes), and he structures the poem to ring with incessant repetitive questioning, demanding of the creature, "Who made thee?" In the third stanza the focus moves from the tiger, the creation, to the creator – of whom Blake wonders "What dread hand? & what dread feet?". "The Tyger" is six stanzas in length, each stanza four lines long. Much of the poem