1. Examine Blake's twin poems "The Tyger" and "The Lamb" as 'two aspects of God and two states of man'.

1. Examine Blake's twin poems "The Tyger" and "The Lamb" as 'two aspects of God and two states of man'.



Ans.: "The Lamb" and "The Tyger", are the representative poems from the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. They collectively confirm Blake's firm belief that 'without contraries there is no progression'. The poems express two aspects of God as well as the two states of men. On the one hand, Lamb' expresses 'innocence' in the imagery of the pastoral, while 'Tyger' expresses 'terror" Lamb represents the Christ to form a Trinity of Child, lamb and Redeemer, Tyger represents the God of wrath. The meaning of one poem is best understood in the presence of other. One is incomplete without the other. Blake, in his songs of innocence and experience had shown the binaries of life. According to his philosophy, man possesses power to attract both creativity and negation. Man undergoes stage of innocence where he is free from the boundations only to suffer in his age of experience. The stage of innocence is filled with naivety and imagination, it forms basis of the pain that is yet to come. Blake tries to capture both these ideas in his songs. He uses several symbols to maintain this contrast between the vision of inno- cence and the thoughts of experience. The poem "The Lamb" contains various connotations that imply sacrifice and death. The image of Christ that appears here is of the one who sacrificed himself to bear the sins of the world. The Tyger, on the other hand, suggests the symbolic cleansing and the other aspect of Christ as Lion of Judah, which is required to overcome hurdles For Blake, innocence is curtailed in the given society and the fear grips the human mind. The lamb changes into Tyger of wrath. It is in the binaries of attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate that the human existence thrives. The dualities of existence thus, are best exemplified when these two poems are read together. Tyger, in fact is at times called a poem of reconciliation. Suffering and pain are realised as essential parts of self. The fiery image of tiger is needed to break the fetters of experience. The lamb is destroyed by the experience, and the tiger is created to restore the world. The duality of creation and destruction is thus evoked here. It is in the Tyger that the good and evil unite to form the opposing ideas. Through these two poems, Blake shows us contradictions of life, in a fearful symmetry".

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