The second implies a different answer: the creator’s willingness to create a world of inhuman ferocity. That is to say, the question may be rephrased as this: “Who but Jehovah himself could dare such a thing?” Or it may instead be rephrased this way: “ How could any immortal, even Jehovah himself, dare frame such a creature?” The first question implies an answer in which the tiger represents the awe-inspring power of the creator.

The interesting thing about that rhetorical question is that its answer is not obvious. It addresses the tiger only in form, but it is purely rhetorical. His final question is the culmination of his questions about God.

But even though the rest of the poem continues to apostrophize the tiger, he feels less and less present as a separate being, becoming more and more an object of the speaker’s own fierce contemplation. This is evident in the famous change from the first to the last stanza, where the final question is altered from: “What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” to “What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” The first question is addressed to the tiger, just as the child has addressed the lamb. The animal then becomes pure representation: He represents God’s power rather than being an actual element in the speaker’s world. Within the context of the poem, this means that the celestial phenomena of starlight and rain reach us as a kind of cosmic response to the creation of the tiger. The tiger’s fierceness is so overwhelming that the stars themselves throw down their spears and water heaven with their tears. God’s dread hand formed the tiger’s dread feet, the dreadfulness of one making palpable the dreadfulness of the other.

The poem gives us as much a bodily sense of the creator as of the creation: It is God’s shoulder that provides the force to twist the sinews of the tiger’s heart, so that we can see in those sinews the straining sinews that formed them. The creator of the lamb calls himself a lamb and is childlike. “The Lamb” alerts us to one important element of “The Tyger,” which is the way the creature represents his creator.

Where the lamb is an embodiment of gentleness, innocence, and trust, the tiger represents everything dreadful about life-about the forests of the night where we spend the half of our lives in which we are the prey of experience. The Tyger is the terrifying pendant to The Lamb in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience as its climactic rhetorical question makes clear: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Like “The Lamb,” it takes the form of an address to the animal that is the poem’s subject, and as in the other poem, it asks the question, “Who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?” The speaker of “The Tyger” is not a child, though, but a man overwhelmed by the fierceness that the tiger embodies.

The tyger songs of experience