‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tiger’ are two poems written by one author known as William Blake. Both of these poems fall into his collection known as the “Songs of Innocence.” ‘The Tiger’ was originally published in the “Songs of Experience” collection in 1794 by the name ‘The Tyger.’ ‘The Lamb,’ on the hand, was published earlier in the collection “Songs of Innocence” in 1789. However, modern anthologies printed the two poems together in the “Songs of Innocence” collection (Glancy 113). The two poems show two diverse ways of seeing things, which raises several unresolved question. Blake represents two different ways in which people experience the world: the sensitive side and the insensitive side. The lamb is used to represent humbleness and innocence, while the tiger represents harsh, tainted, and brutal. The author uses the two animals to express the nature of humanity; how people change from the innocent children that God created to the tainted and resentful people. This paper compares and contrasts the two poems: ‘The lamb’ and ‘The Tiger.’
Similarities and Differences between ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tiger’
Both poems use an aspect of addressing the readers directly even though the reader does not directly hear the poets’ voices. The expressions serve as an avenue of communication between the poets and the reader. This aims at involving the reader emotionally in instances of awful characters as well as the pleasant characters demonstrated in the poems. More so, both poems use verses as an effective tool to be in close contact with the reader. This is an effective way of helping the reader to create a mental picture, following the questions proposed by the writer.
According to the interpretation of the poems, the lamb and the tiger represent the human souls’ states. The lamb represents a soul that is full of mildness, innocence, and beauty, while the tiger represents a soul that is full of power. The two souls have a relationship, as power is needed to restore the world when innocence suffers a drawback. As such, the world cannot balance if the two states are missing. Although it is hard to imagine God would create creatures, which possess diverse characteristics, their co-existence makes God’s definitive purpose. The ideas presented in the poems portray the writer’s state of mind: being overwhelmed by the complexity in the creation of the lamb and the tiger.
The two poems use questions format that end up being unanswered. The questions try to read the mind of God with regard to creating the two creatures too differently. The way the two poems end depicts how God ways are mysterious, and this makes the author to be unable to comprehended God’s creation (Gillham 74-75). This, in turn, makes the reader to remain puzzled by the complexity of creation, the inscrutability of divine will, and the magnitude of God’s power. The two poems have similar questions though phrased differently: in the lamb the author questions, “Little lamb, who made thee?” while in ‘The Tiger’ the author questions, “Did He who made the lamb make thee?”
The poets use repetition to stress a certain point of view. Repetition of line is evident in ‘The Lamb’ (Blake 13).This feature is normally applied in emotional poems to guide the reader on areas that the needs to be noted. The repetition accumulates the feelings of the poet on the subject matter. Therefore, repetition in these poems brings an aspect of the degree of emphasis that is laid on the matter at hand. In ‘The Tiger,’ the poet repeats completely the first stanza to make the last stanza of the poem (Blake 71). In addition, the poets use other forms of repetition such as assonance and rhyme to stress on main points and to make the poems more interesting. These repetitions help the reader to embrace the writer’s point of view by creating