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Crystal Weissenberger

Dr. Kristin Ross

ENG 2245

November 10, 2014

Comparison of William Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”

In William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, he creates a

series of poems that contrast one another such as “The Lamb” which describes an

innocent, child-like view of the world and “The Tyger” which describes a more mature

world-view. In Blake’s poem “The Lamb,” he has an innocent child speaking to a lamb

about God and the wondrous gift of life that the lamb has received and how the Son of

God is also called a Lamb (Blake 120 Line 14). Blake uses this innocent and joyous

conversation to portray the infinite goodness of God as seen through the worshipful eyes

of a child. In contrast, Blake’s poem entitled “The Tyger” is questioning why the God

who made the gentle lamb would also make such a ferocious creature as the Tyger (Blake

130 Line 20). Instead of the stated assurance of the child in “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” is

a constant questioning with no hints of the innocence in the previous poem. The speaker

of “The Tyger” is more mature in the words picked to describe the Tyger while the word

choice in “The Lamb” is more artless. The differences in William Blake’s “The Lamb”

and “The Tyger” are shown by the innocent child speaker in “The Lamb” and the more

mature speaker in “The Tyger” in which contrasting techniques are used to juxtapose the

two poems: the simpler sentence structure used in “The Lamb” and the more complicated

rhetorical questions used in “The Tyger”; the ingenuous word choices in “The Lamb” and

the more sophisticated ones in “The Tyger”; and the literal assurance of the child in “The
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Lamb” that God is the Creator and the lack of an answer for a creator in “The Tyger.”

“The Lamb” is indeed a Song of Innocence while “The Tyger” is a Song of Experience.

In Blake’s “The Lamb,” there is simplicity in how the child speaks. The child is

speaking to an actual lamb asking it in the beginning if the lamb knows how it came to be

made: “Little Lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?” (Blake 120

Lines 1-2). The use of the literary device called apostrophe adds to the tone that this

poem is being spoken by a child since the child seems to feel no embarrassment in talking

to an animal or that there is something slightly ridiculous in speaking to one either as

perhaps an older person might feel. The simplistic sentence structure also utilizes

repetition in the first and second couplets of each of the two stanzas which lend the poem

a sense of a child’s “sing-song” type of rhythm. In contrast, “The Tyger” uses the more

sophisticated literary device of the rhetorical question as in the introductory lines:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (Blake 129 Lines 1-4)

The speaker is still using the device called apostrophe, but not in such a simplistic way as

the child in “The Lamb.” The tone is more introspective as if the speaker is speaking out-

loud to himself rather than to the actual Tyger. The speaker seems to view the Tyger as

something to be feared as when it is mentions “the fire of thine eyes?” so it is improbable

that the speaker would be in too close a proximity with the animal as the child seemed to

be in “The Lamb” (Blake 129 Line 6). The use of repetition and apostrophe in the

sentence structure of “The Lamb,” therefore, is much more indicative of innocence than

the lack of repetition and the use of apostrophe shows in the “The Tyger.”
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The word choices made by William Blake in “The Lamb” lends a feeling of child-

like innocence and the ones made by him in “The Tyger” gives one the impression of a

more experienced speaker. In “The Lamb” the child tells the lamb that God gave it life,

food, water, and clothing thus providing it with all its basic needs:

Gave thee life & bid thee feed,

By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright; (Blake 120 Lines 3-6)

The word choices used gives the reader the impression that a child is the one speaking.

For example, if the first sentence had said, “He created you and then gave you hay, oats,

and other grasses on which to dine” then the tone would not have been childlike

whatsoever. The simplistic nature of the words “life” and “feed” by Blake give the reader

an immediate feeling that the speaker is a child and not a teenager or an adult. However,

in “The Tyger” the word choices are much more complex as when the speaker asks

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? (Blake 130 Lines 13-16)

The imagery of this stanza is one of a smith in his ford. If the second line had said, “Did

someone create you from fire?” then it would have sounded more naïve and the speaker

would not have sounded as sophisticated as he does. The last word in the poem “The

Tyger” is “symmetry” (Blake 130 Line 24). A child would not use such a word at all. A

child would have said “same” or perhaps “alike.” There is none of the plainness of word

choice in “The Tyger” as is present in “The Lamb” which supports the feeling of

innocence in “The Lamb” and that of experience in “The Tyger.”

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William Blake offers the lamb an answer for its existence by the child, but he

offers no such assurances in “The Tyger.” In “The Lamb” the child very plainly tells the

lamb that he (the child) will tell the lamb who his creator is:

He is callèd by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb;
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child;
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are callèd by his name (Blake 120 Lines 13-18).

The child has no doubts about who the creator is or that His son resides in all living

creatures – him and the lamb specifically. He trusts that this is the Truth, and he expects

that the lamb will believe it too. There is no such assurance in the questioning in “The

Tyger.” No explicit conclusion is drawn about the creator of the Tyger other than to ask

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” (Blake 130 Line 20). No answer for the

question is provided at all. It is totally left in ambiguity. The speaker is old enough to

realize that answers to certain theological questions are not clear, but left to an infinite

number of inquiries instead. Instead of the “black and white” portrayed in “The Lamb”

that God is the ultimate Creator of all things, the “The Tyger” shows a more experienced

philosophical outlook of all the “shades of grey” that adults tend to view the idea of a

Creator. The speaker in “The Tyger” goes on to ask “What immortal hand or eye / Dare

frame thy fearful symmetry?” as if to question the wondrous God that the child venerated

in “The Lamb” why anyone would want to create something as horrible as the Tyger

(Blake 130 Lines 23-24). There is absolutely experience shown in Blake’s non-answers

in “The Tyger” while nothing but innocence is portrayed in the definite answer given by

the child in the “The Lamb” about the identity of the Creator.
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William Blake tackles a difficult subject in “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” within

his works the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience: who is God? He uses an

innocent child in “The Lamb” to state unequivocally that God is the Creator, but uses a

more mature speaker in “The Tyger” to question who the creator may be and why he

would create evil as well as good. The ways in which he contrasts these two poems and

their opposing points-of-view are done by using simple sentence structure, unpretentious

word choices, and giving the child complete assurance in its belief in God in “The Lamb”

and by using more complicated rhetorical questions, more detailed and sophisticated

word choices, and lack of concrete belief in a creator in “The Tyger.”

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Works Cited

Blake, William. “The Lamb.”The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic

Period. 9th ed. Vol. D. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 2012. 120. Print.

Blake, William. “The Tyger.”The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic

Period. 9th ed. Vol. D. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 2012. 129-130. Print.