William Blake’s poetry mirrored his obsession with seeing things as they appear to be and as they really were. Being a visual artist probably helped him to express himself in words by visual means. Some suspect that he was blessed (or cursed) with illnesses that gave him the ability to see auras, even microscopic vision, where some critics speculate that he could see atoms in motion. He claimed to be able to see angels and the future. This helped shape his own brand of complex spirituality, based on a mixture of his own storytelling ability and Christian denomination called Gnosticism, where spiritual truths derived from personal insight rather than set orthodoxy.
In his life, William Blake wrote nursery rhymes and epic poems of novel length. He would swing from using simplistic quatrains to convoluted mythologies. With such a wide variety of poetry in his cannon, it can be hard to see an overview. But it can be seen in one Blake’s best known poems, “The Tyger”.
Simple Yet Complex
“The Tyger” originally appeared in Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789), which is often mistaken as a collection of poems for children. Many poems, including “The Tyger” look like nursery rhymes (short-lined quartets with an AABB rhyme scheme) but the images and messages presented is definitely not child’s play.
This is a well balanced poem of a mere twenty-four lines long, divided up into six quatrains. There are actually only five quatrains, since the first is repeated at the end. Just glancing at “The Tyger” without reading it makes the poem look neat, orderly and balanced. This is a subterfuge for the poem itself. Inside the neat order, there is chaos and confusion.
“When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears”
There is a very strange pair of lines in the fourth quatrain that presents an image that doesn’t quite fit in with any known metaphor or popular image of the time:
“When the Stars threw down their Spears
and water’d Heaven with their tears”
What the heck is this about? Even the people of 1789 must have been as confused as they were delighted by the image and the sounds of Blake’s words rolling off of the tongue. Although there is a reference to Heaven, there is no Biblical story to match this. There isn’t any classical mythological story to match. There has been some suggestion that this is Blake’s description of a shooting star.
Most likely, this is a reference to Blake’s own convoluted spirituality. In The Book of Urizen (one of his huge epic poems that are hardly ever read) angels are referred to as “stars”. This is our best guess as to what Blake was referring to – rebellious angels surrendering to God before being thrown into Hell. Blake’s works were strongly influenced by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, where Lucifer leads a rebellion of Angels against God.
At the beginning of the poem, we read the child-like chant of
“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night”
and assume we are in for an easy ride with a cute description of a tiger. We’re not. We are shown images of fire, doom and this strange pairing of armed stars surrendering while weeping. We can only assume that it is to the Tyger that they are surrendering.
And then we read again
“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night”
This time around, we don’t find it cute or charming. It is a bit disturbing, because Blake hints at the things unseen. We are now disturbed because we wonder what Blake has purposefully left out of the poem, as if it was too terrible for us to see. Most of Blake’s poetry is like that — a reworking of Biblical myth, with a bit of his own imagery thrown in.
