William Blake is an English Romantic poet and artist during the French Revolution. In his writing he attempts to express his inner struggles about religion and politics in both pictures and words, which no other writer has attempted to do before him. Blake uses symbolism in his poems “The Tiger” and “The Lamb” to depict the all-powerful being that created both evil and good that exist together in one world, but he also shows that two totally opposite things can exist in harmony in the same world.
In “The Tiger” Blake asks how an all-perfect God, responsible for innocence and goodness, could be the creator of violence and evil. This poem uses the jungle cat to symbolize “the savage and untamed forces in the natural world” (Prentice Hall, 551). The tiger of t
beauty that is difficult for the human imagination to conceive.
Even though Blake has created two totally different themes in these two poems, he shows that evil and good co-exist in the world that was created by one God. He depicts the lamb as being the innocent people of the world and the tiger as being the rash brutal people of the world. He shows the evil side of the world in one poem and the gentleness and meekness of life in the other poem. In “The Tiger” and “The Lamb” Blake presents the two different themes created by one God to show that good and evil came from the same origin.
he poem contains a symmetrical form that goes along with the energy it contains and the good and evil of the experience. In the first stanza of the poem, the tiger is seen as “a burning figure in the night”