Romanticism in Blake's Poetry

The Romantic style places great weight on language and imagery grounded in nature (the tiger, the lamb, the rose) and in the wildness and strangeness of the natural world. At the same time, Blake's poems are meant to show a connection between nature and human states of mind and spirit, including both the pure and the corrupt sides of those states.

Blake's style in these poems is also deceptively simple, so that a child might read them and take them for their surface meaning. The symbols are powerful though simple, because they are so striking and call to mind so many associations, for both adult and child, for both simple-minded and sophisticated. At the same time, Blake's use of natural symbolism, in the Romantic vein, gives these three poems a greater depth and complexity than it might first appear. While the poems are open to many interpretations, this study will take the view that they have as their true subject God and His Creation.

. . .
oward the tiger and the lamb. The mixing of awe for the terrifying tiger and the gentle lamb show that the speaker recognizes that the Creator behind them is a mysterious force capable of imagining and bringing to form such disparate entities. The symbol of the lamb is most importantly associated with Jesus Christ, known as the Lamb of God, giving us the sense that the two poems in conjunction, perhaps, are meant to symbolize the might of Jehovah and the meekness of Jesus. Blake uses the great orange-and-black striped beast to stand for the mysterious and threatening might of nature in the form of a wild animal. The first four lines of the poem introduce the image of the tiger in relation to the maker of the tiger, or God, the "immortal hand or eye." The poem is made up of questions about the Creator behind the tiger, rather than an argument about what or who God is or is not. The "fearful symmetry" of the tiger's markings which are "burning bright" make the poet stand in awe as his imagination conjures questions about the "hand" which made the beast. The poet asks in the second stanza what depths, heights and lengths of daring courage this Creator must possess. Where does this creator dwell and how high can he or it fly, and "
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Approximate Word count = 1431
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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