The Full Text of “The Tyger”
1Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
2In the forests of the night;
3What immortal hand or eye,
4Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
5In what distant deeps or skies.
6Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
7On what wings dare he aspire?
8What the hand, dare seize the fire?
9And what shoulder, & what art,
10Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
11And when thy heart began to beat,
12What dread hand? & what dread feet?
13What the hammer? what the chain,
14In what furnace was thy brain?
15What the anvil? what dread grasp,
16Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
17When the stars threw down their spears
18And water'd heaven with their tears:
19Did he smile his work to see?
20Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
21Tyger Tyger burning bright,
22In the forests of the night:
23What immortal hand or eye,
24Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The Full Text of “The Tyger”
1Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
2In the forests of the night;
3What immortal hand or eye,
4Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
5In what distant deeps or skies.
6Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
7On what wings dare he aspire?
8What the hand, dare seize the fire?
9And what shoulder, & what art,
10Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
11And when thy heart began to beat,
12What dread hand? & what dread feet?
13What the hammer? what the chain,
14In what furnace was thy brain?
15What the anvil? what dread grasp,
16Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
17When the stars threw down their spears
18And water'd heaven with their tears:
19Did he smile his work to see?
20Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
21Tyger Tyger burning bright,
22In the forests of the night:
23What immortal hand or eye,
24Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
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“The Tyger” Introduction
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"The Tyger" is a poem by visionary English poet William Blake, and is often said to be the most widely anthologized poem in the English language. It consists entirely of questions about the nature of God and creation, particularly whether the same God that created vulnerable beings like the lamb could also have made the fearsome tiger. The tiger becomes a symbol for one of religion's most difficult questions: why does God allow evil to exist? At the same time, however, the poem is an expression of marvel and wonder at the tiger and its fearsome power, and by extension the power of both nature and God.
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“The Tyger” Summary
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The speaker directly addresses a tiger, imagining its bright flashes of color in the dark night-time forest. The speaker asks which immortal being could possibly have created the tiger's fearsome beauty.
The speaker wonders in which far-off depths or skies the tiger's fiery eyes were made. Did the tiger's creator have wings, and whose hand would be daring enough to create the tiger?
The speaker imagines the kind of effort and skill that must have gone into creating the tiger, wondering who would be strong enough to build the tiger's muscular body. Whose hands and feet were the ones that made the tiger's heart start beating?
The speaker wonders about the tools the tiger's creator must have used, imagining that the tiger's brain was created in a forge. What terrifying being would be so daring as to create the tiger?
The speaker mentions a time when the stars gave up their weapons and rained their tears on heaven. At this time, wonders the speaker, did the creator look at the tiger and smile at his accomplishment? And was the tiger made by the same creator who made the lamb?
The speaker addresses the tiger again, this time wondering not just who could create this fearsome beast—but who would dare.
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“The Tyger” Themes
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The Existence of Evil
Like its sister poem, “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” expresses awe at the marvels of God’s creation, represented here by a tiger. But the tiger poses a problem: everything about it seems to embody fear, danger, and terror. In a series of questions, the speaker of “The Tyger” wonders whether this creature was really created by the same God who made the world’s gentle and joyful creatures. And if the tiger was created by God, why did God choose to create such a fearsome animal? Through the example of the tiger, the poem examines the existence of evil in the world, asking the same question in many ways: if God created everything and is all-powerful, why does evil exist?
The speaker tries to reconcile the tiger's frightening nature with the idea of a loving God, but this attempt leads only to a series of seemingly unanswerable questions. The tiger is presented as an impressive figure and seems to be part of God’s design for the world. It “burns brightly” and has a “symmetry,” a quality which Blake often associates with beauty and purposeful intent on God’s part. But that “symmetry” is also “fearful.” The tiger seems designed to kill and inflict pain. In other words, the tiger behaves in a way that seems counter to God's laws and ethics. The tiger’s association with fire (“burning brightly,” for example) underscores this point—it’s visually impressive but dangerous to get close to.
The poem then meditates on the specific moment of the tiger’s creation (“when thy heart began to beat”). It questions God’s motivations in making the tiger, even considering the possibility that it wasn’t actually God who made the tiger. The speaker struggles to understand how a God that made the small, vulnerable lamb could also choose to make a being that would surely eat the lamb given half a chance. In other words, the speaker struggles to understand why God would create something that seems to have destruction as its very purpose.
The poem leaves this line of questioning unanswered, though the questions are themselves made very clear and stark. They are, essentially, handed over to the reader to consider; the speaker doesn’t know for sure why God has created something that seems evil. However, by detailing the tiger’s fearsomeness and by directly comparing it to the innocent and gentle lamb, the poem hints that perhaps both creatures are necessary parts of God’s creation. That is, perhaps the majesty of God’s work requires these kinds of oppositional forces. By giving the tiger the same kind of consideration as the lamb, the speaker suggests that without fear and danger, there could be no love and joy.
Opposites run throughout Blake’s work—innocence and experience, the city and nature, childhood and adulthood—and so the tiger and the lamb can be seen as part of this pattern. In order for God to fully express his divinity, he has to create elements of the world that go beyond the understanding of humanity. God proves its power precisely because He acts in ways that humanity cannot fully comprehend.
The poem, then, is a deeply complex set of questions that have no easy answers. There is no doubt, though, that the poem wants its reader to consider the way in which the world seems to contain both good and evil—to acknowledge these contradictory forces and question why they exist, even though the answers may never be clear.
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Creativity
Though "The Tyger" is specifically about how the nature of God's creation can be reconciled with the existence of the fearsome tiger, it's also about creativity more generally. Everything about the creation of the tiger suggests effort, skill, artistry, and imagination on the creator's part, suggesting that these qualities are necessary to create anything as frighteningly beautiful as the tiger. What's more, the speaker also hints that good creation—in art, for example—needs to incorporate this more dangerous and intimidating side of the world. Without that complexity, the poem suggests, a work of art won't be fully honest and authentic.
The poem is itself, of course, the product of intense creativity. Blake revised and revised this poem, trying to pin it down to the exact form that best embodies its complicated questions. This artistry is mirrored by some of the word choices made throughout. For example, the "framing" of "symmetry" (lines 4 and 24) suggests a visual artist or engraver (like Blake himself) making sure the proportions of a project are correct. This type of language, which characterizes creativity as both effort and skill, is also found in the third and fourth stanzas. The fourth stanza in particular describes a metal workshop, where beautiful things are made under intensely hot and pressured conditions.
Along these lines, it's also important to note the way in which the creation of the tiger is consistently linked with fire. Indeed, the tiger itself is a kind of fiery creature, testament to the intense imagination with which it was created. Imagination itself is characterized as a kind of fire from which things can be created, if the creator is brave, strong, and skilled enough. There may even be an allusion to the Greek myth of Prometheus here, who tricked the gods, stealing fire and giving it to humanity. However, Prometheus was not rewarded for his ingenuity; instead, he was condemned to eternal punishment.
The imagination, the poem ultimately suggests, is the location of a miraculous but dangerous kind of creative strength. That's why it takes bravery—the willingness to "dare," as the poem would put it—to create anything of any worth out of the "fire" of creativity. This interpretation of creativity certainly rings true with the story of Blake's life: for all his commitment, effort, and genius, he was thought of more as a madman than a visionary during his lifetime.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Tyger”
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Lines 1-4
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?The first stanza sets up the poem's main thematic questions: Who created the tiger, how, and why? The speaker in this poem's sister poem, "The Lamb," is able to identify God as the creator of the lamb because the small creature seems to represent joy, love, and freedom—but the tiger is an entirely different figure altogether. The poem does imply that God created the tiger too, but in the tiger's threat of violence and capacity for killing, it's harder for human beings to understand God's motivations for creating it. Essentially, the main aim of the poem is to flesh out this mystery, and to hint at possible answers.
The poem begins with an instance of epizeuxis, with the immediate repetition of "Tyger," which signals to the reader that the tiger is the central figure throughout. And like "The Lamb," "The Tyger" directly addresses the central figure with apostrophe throughout. Indeed, the poem is a kind of awed and fearful meditation on the fact of the tiger's existence. The alliterative "burning bright" creates the visual image of a flash of impressive color moving through the "forests of the night"—which is both a beautiful sight and a terrifying one. Though the poem predates the theories of psychoanalysis put forward by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the "forests" can be interpreted both as the tiger's literal habitat and as a symbol of the human subconscious/unconscious. As this is a poem in part about creativity, the dark and mysterious atmosphere of the forest hints at the mysteries of creation—both in the human and the godly realms.
Lines 3 and 4 introduce the speaker's preoccupation with the creative act. To the speaker, the tiger is too majestic and well-designed a figure to have come into existence by accident. Some "immortal" being must have deliberately created the tiger. Of course, the preoccupation isn't just about tigers. The poem's narrator is really asking why God, as an all-powerful creator with a master plan, decided to create the more fearsome parts of existence as well as the more obviously joyful ones (such as the lamb). Consider the evil that humans inflict on each other, for example—why did God even create that capacity in humankind?
But rather than suggesting God was wrong to create things that seem evil, the poem seems to indicate that elements of God's design for the world are simply beyond the limits of human understanding. People can see evidence of God's divine will, and worship it, but they should never claim to know and understand it fully. Life is full of these mysteries, which is why the rest of the poem consists entirely of rhetorical questions. The poem seeks to illuminate the parts of existence that humans cannot fully comprehend, not in order to explain them away, but rather to marvel cautiously at their presence.
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Lines 5-8
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire? -
Lines 9-12
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet? -
Lines 13-16
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp! -
Lines 17-20
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? -
Lines 21-24
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
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“The Tyger” Symbols
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The Tiger
Like the lamb in Blake's poem of the same name, the tiger represents an aspect of God. Whereas the lamb seems to suggest that God is Ioving and tender, in line with the idea of a fatherly God overseeing his flock, the tiger speaks to another side of God's character.
The poem gently suggests that God created the tiger, but it also allows for the possibility that it was Satan who did so (as one of the fallen angels that line 17 might be describing). Either way, God is ultimately responsible, since (in the Christian tradition) God created heaven, earth, and hell. The tiger is therefore symbolic of God's ability to be violent and frightening, traits which seem to be at odds with the creator who made the small and vulnerable lamb. The tiger, then, also represents the unknowability of God: humankind can love God and be in awe of his creations, but it can never hope to fully comprehend the way that God operates within and conceives of the world.
"The Tyger" is ultimately less about actual tigers (or other specific frightening things) and more about all the large concepts that humanity finds it difficult to comprehend. God created the world, but the world is full of suffering, pain, hatred and violence. The tiger thus symbols those parts of God (and the world) that humans struggle to reconcile with their idea of God.
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Fire
The poem picks up on the visual appearance of the tiger—its bright orange striped coat—and associates this with fire. This helps to characterize the tiger as dangerous and destructive, and to generally create a tense atmosphere throughout the poem.
But fire also represents the imagination, both of the ultimate creator—God—and of more humble human artists and craftspeople. The imagined creator in the poem literally draws the tiger from the fire, which is presented as the kind of necessarily harsh and pressurized environment from which something as majestic and fearsome as the tiger could be made. The implication here is that true creation requires bravery—that is, a willingness to put a hand into the fires of the imagination and make something. The symbol of fire shows that the poem holds the creative act in high regard.
Finally, fire may also symbolize a connection to hell ("distant deeps," line 5) or Satan in the poem. The speaker suggests that God created the tiger, while also leaving open the possibility (particularly in line 17) that Satan was the one responsible for the tiger—and perhaps for evil more generally. Notably, however, this fire isn't presented as a wholly bad thing, even if it does come from hell; instead, it's shown to be a necessary part of creating something as darkly wondrous as the tiger. Through the images of fire as a productive force, the speaker suggests that even if evil forces like hell and Satan do play a part in shaping the world, they're still components of God's larger plan for creation.
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Industrial Tools
The fourth stanza is the only one in which the speaker imagines the tiger's creator using tools. The ones described are all industrial tools, which allows the stanza to build the noisy and fiery atmosphere of a metal workshop. These tools symbolize a certain type of creativity, in which skill and vision alone are not enough. Rather, the creator also needs willpower and bravery in order to build meaningful creations.
Additionally, the "hammer," "chain," "furnace," and "anvil" are all distinctly industrial (as opposed to, say, paintbrushes and canvas). This choice of symbols evokes the Industrial Revolution, which was at full pace during Blake's lifetime. If the tiger does represent a kind of evil, then perhaps this moral judgment extends to the practices of industry too. However, the poem resists such conclusive interpretations. Rather, this symbol seems to showcase the way that artistry, ugliness, and danger all exist in close proximity.
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“The Tyger” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration occurs frequently throughout "The Tyger," usually as a way of representing the poem's events and settings through sound. For example, in line 1 (and in its repeat in line 21), the repeated /b/ sound of "burning bright" makes the phrase more colorful and vivid. That is, the close repetition of the sound creates a kind of intensity that is meant to conjure the intense bright light emitted by a fire. The effect is both aural and visual.
In line 4 (and again in line 24), an /f/ sound repeats in "frame" and "fearful." Here, the narrator is expressing a cautious sense of awe at the abilities and powers of whoever created the tiger. The use of "frame" relates to artistry and craftsmanship, and the deliberate placement of the alliteration creates a sense of meticulousness, skill, and attention to detail. In other words, the creation of the tiger, though difficult to understand, is undoubtedly deliberate.
Line 5 uses two /d/ sounds in "distant deeps" to create a sense of depth that perhaps relates to the idea of hell as an underground place. The following stanzas describe the tiger being created in an atmosphere of high pressure and heat, and the use of alliteration here helps to foreshadow that atmosphere. It is as though the poem itself is under a similar pressure, causing a chemical reaction in the words that makes them take on matching forms—and sound alike.
Later, line 11's alliteration brings the idea of a heart beating to sonic life, with the two /b/ sounds in "began" and "beat" creating a pulsating, rhythmic sound.
The alliteration of line 16 links "daringness" and "deadliness" together conceptually (and also recalls the /d/ sounds in line 5). This instance of alliteration underscores a key part of the poem's argument: humans should not reject the tiger outright as a fearsome creature, but rather appreciate the bravery of the creator for bringing it into being.
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Apostrophe
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Anaphora
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Epizeuxis
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End-Stopped Line
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Rhetorical Question
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Personification
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Paradox
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Refrain
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"The Tyger" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Thy
- Symmetry
- Deeps
- Thine
- Aspire
- Art
- Sinews
- Anvil
- Clasp
- Thee
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Thy is an archaic form of "your."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Tyger”
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Form
"The Tyger" consists of six quatrains. The first and last quatrains are almost identical, with subtle differences in their punctuation and the change of the word "could" to "dare." This is important because the four stanzas in between characterize the creator that made the tiger as being daring—that is, the tiger is a fearsome creature and its creator must have been brave to make it. Assuming the creator to be God, the one-word change between the first and last stanzas speaks to the fact that God was not just able to make the tiger, but willing. In other words, the speaker of the poem sees God as wanting to introduce fear and danger into the world—and the motivation for that desire is one of the poem's central mysteries.
The similarity between the first and final stanzas also gives the poem its own "symmetry," showcasing the kind of artistry and skill that the poem itself discusses as key parts of the act of creation. The form of the poem is itself "framed" symmetrically, just like the tiger.
The other important aspect of the form to consider is that the poem consists entirely of questions. This choice speaks to the fact that the poem has doubt and mystery at its heart. These are questions to which there are no clear available answers, but to the speaker, they nonetheless seem to confirm God's power.
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Meter
"The Tyger" has a strong sense of meter throughout, which is part of the reason it is one of the most widely memorized poems in the English language.
But although the meter sounds simple, it is technically quite complex. It feels trochaic, but it doesn't quite fit a trochaic scheme because none of the lines finishes with an unstressed syllable. If the first line were truly trochaic, for example, it would need another syllable:
Tyger | Tyger, | burning | brightly
This would be a line of pure trochaic tetrameter, but the real line has what is called a catalectic final foot. This just means that it is missing an unstressed syllable at the end of the line. This trochaic catalectic meter—found in every line but lines 4, 10, 11, 18, and 24—creates a sense of pressure throughout the poem, as if the meter is reflecting the intense, fiery conditions under which the speaker imagines the tiger was created.
There are times, however, where the meter is more iambic than trochaic. Lines 4, 10, 11, 18 and 24 fit an iambic scheme. The poem could be characterized, then, as iambic tetrameter with a number of catalectic first feet. The iambic meter that appears in line 11 is an interesting variation, with the regularity of the stresses making the line sound like the beating heart it describes:
And when | thy heart | began | to beat,
The important thing, though, is how the meter makes the poem feel and how it affects the reader's experience—not pinning it down in technical terminology. Throughout, the meter feels propulsive and engaging, and it helps draw the reader into the speaker's vivid imagery and moral argument.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Tyger" is written in rhyming couplets throughout, using the form:
AABB
Each stanza has its own pair of rhymes following that same scheme. This steady rhyme pattern gives the poem a sense of forward propulsion—anything else would probably make the poem feel too disrupted, given that it already consists of abrupt rhetorical questions. The couplets also make the poem highly memorable, perhaps explaining why it occupies such a prominent position in English literature.
The couplet format is also important because it creates symmetry, an idea that is important to Blake throughout his poetry and that he often relates to God's intelligent design for the world. That is, the heavily patterned lines of the poem reflect the poem's argument that there is a God and that this God has a plan—even if that plan isn't completely comprehensible to humans.
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“The Tyger” Speaker
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The speaker in the poem is unspecified and is never uses the first person. The anonymous speaker is clearly in awe of both the tiger and the incredible powers of whatever creator made such a fearsome creature. Accordingly, the speaker is restless and doubtful, probing into the mysteries of the universe through a relentless series of rhetorical questions. The speaker is both intimated and amazed to think about the "dread" and "daringness" of whoever it was that made the tiger. The speaker's key question is whether the same creator that made the tiger could be the one that made the lamb as well, since the lamb is a creature almost entirely opposite to the tiger.
Because the speaker is anonymous and expresses such universal concerns, it seems almost as though the speaker could stand in for humanity as a whole. After all, most people do wonder about the same kinds of existential questions that the speaker brings up, and so the speaker could even be interpreted as humankind rather than a single individual.
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“The Tyger” Setting
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The setting of the poem is unspecified. In part, the poem's opening situates the reader in the tiger's natural habitat—the dark murky forest or jungle. In that sense, the poem opens with a vague sense of threat and danger, as though the reader has wandered into a setting in which they are suddenly prey rather than predator.
But then, the rest of the poem takes the reader on a journey through worlds that seem to be both abstract and concrete. The second stanza tries to imagine where the tiger was created, while the third tries to imagine the physical form of its creator. The fourth stanza is more like an industrial workshop, with loud assonance helping to create a sonic atmosphere that implies heat and pressure.
The fifth stanza seems to be more mythical, wondering about the heavens themselves and perhaps relating to the war between God and some of his angels that is described in John Milton's Paradise Lost. The final stanza returns to the setting of the first, underlining that the poem's core questions can never truly be answered (at least in ways that human beings can comprehend).
As the poem consists entirely of questions that strike at the heart of the meaning and nature of existence, the overall setting is also the speaker's mind—and perhaps, by extension, the mind of any human who wonders about similar questions.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Tyger”
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Literary Context
"The Tyger" was published as part of the Experience section of William Blake's best-known work, Songs of Innocence and Experience (first published in 1794, though Innocence was published individually a few years prior). This book of poems is essentially a didactic work of moralizing through poetry, though Blake resists oversimplifying difficult situations. Innocence and experience relate closely to the Biblical ideas of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, and Blake's work is generally full of such opposites: childhood vs. adulthood, life vs. death, freedom vs. imprisonment. In the same way, "The Tyger" is intended as a companion poem to "The Lamb," which appears in the Innocence section of the book. The contrast between the two is important: whereas the child speaker of "The Lamb" sees evidence of a loving God everywhere, the speaker of "The Tyger" wonders about all the fear and mystery that life actually brings. In other words, it adds experience to innocence. While this poem still seems to be an argument in favor of God's existence and his plan for the universe, it makes this case with much less certainty than its companion poem.
A key poetic influence on Blake was John Milton, whose Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained also creatively examined humankind's relationship to God. Indeed, the possibility that a creature with "wings" created the tiger (line 7) is possibly a reference to the war between God and Satan as outlined in Milton's epic poem. Blake was also a wide reader of religious scholarship, which undoubtedly played a formative role in his poetry. For example, the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish Lutheran theologian, can be seen in the way Blake consistently depicts the fundamental spirituality of humanity.
Blake was not well-known as a poet in his time, and many of his contemporaries considered him to be a madman. He worked primarily as a painter, printmaker, and engraver, and he felt that his poetry was misunderstood in his era. He did not enjoy the success of some of the other poets associated with the same time period, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. This sense of isolation gives Blake's poetry a radical and prophetic quality; his poems often seem like small acts of rebellion against the status quo of the day. Also important to his work is the idea of the visionary—there are many accounts of Blake witnessing angels or other spiritual ephemera, and this plays into the prophetic quality of his writing. Indeed, the speaker here seems to have a visionary ability to see through space and time into the moment of the tiger's creation—though the speaker is still unable to comprehend the full meaning of this moment.
Blake is often grouped together with the Romantic poets, and his work does share certain common ground with the Romantic ideals that dominated the late 17th and early 18th centuries. These ideals include the importance of childhood, the imagination, and the power of nature. However, his life and writings are distinct enough that it may make more sense to regard him as a singular entity in English literature, rather than as a solely Romantic poet.
Historical Context
Blake was a deeply religious man, but he was highly critical of the Church of England, and of organized religion more generally. He was born to a family of Dissenters, a group of English Protestants who broke away from and rebelled against the Church of England. Questioning the religious status quo was therefore instilled in Blake from a very young age. He saw top-down religious structures as restrictions on individual liberties, and as obstacles to the direct relationship between humankind and God. Blake's rebellious streak owed something to the American and French revolutions, which gave thinkers opportunities to dream of better forms of society. Indeed, rebellion is hinted at throughout the poem, both in the danger and violence that the tiger represents and in lines 17 and 18, which seem to relate to some kind of heavenly battle (perhaps between God and Satan).
Blake was also writing during the accelerating Industrial Revolution, and he saw its economic, social, and environmental changes as threats to humankind. For Blake, the factories of the Industrial Revolution represented a form of physical and mental enslavement—the "mind-forg'd manacles" mentioned in his poem "London." "The Tyger" touches on the frightening nature of industry in stanza four, where the speaker describes the loud, fiery metalwork shop that may have created the tiger. Indeed, if the tiger is taken to represent evil, the poem may even be implying that evil comes from industry.
As for tigers, they were certainly not a common sight in 18th century London. But Blake would have seen illustrations of tigers and, most likely, have seen live tigers in traveling shows. Most people find the illustration that often accompanies this poem quite comical, in that it doesn't seem particularly fearsome, but if it was based on a traveling menagerie, it's quite possible that what Blake saw was actually a tiger cub.
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More “The Tyger” Resources
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External Resources
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Blake's Visions — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's religious visions.
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A Reading by Ian Richardson — A chillingly beautiful rendition of the poem by actor Ian Richardson.
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Illustrations and Other Poems — A resource from the Tate organization, which holds a large collection of Blake originals.
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Full Text of Songs of Innocence and Experience — Various formats for the full text in which "The Tyger" is collected.
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Illustration and Discussion — A resource from the British Library that shows Blake's illustrations for the poem and discusses it in depth.
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Blake's Radicalism — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's radicalism.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake
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