The Tyger The Tyger "The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake published in 1794 as part of the "Songs of Experience" collection. Literary critic Alfred Kazin calls it "the most famous of his poems", and "The Cambridge Companion to William Blake" says it is "the most anthologized poem in English". It is one of Blake's most reinterpreted and arranged works. The "Songs of Experience" was published in 1794 as a follow up to Blake's 1789 "Songs of Innocence." The two books were published together under the merged title "Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the Two Contrary
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