What dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp? There were five children in the family, Blake was the second one. In it, Blake speaks directly to a lamb, playing on the animal representation for the Lord Jesus Christ. Are the forests of the night different from the ones of the day? How is it possible that human beings can be both good and evil? It is Jesus Christ who calls himself a Lamb. About William Blake 'The Lamb' is a short poem written by William Blake, an English poet who lived from 1757 to 1827 and wrote at the beginning of the Romantic movement. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. It has a tender voice which fills the valley with joy.
Later in the poem Blake refers to another one of his poems, The Lamb, and he asks the tiger if God made it since God made the lamb. When the Creator fashioned the Tyger, Blake asks, did he look with pride upon the animal he had created? Tyger, Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Fortunately for us, the poet William Blake put these animals in separate 'rooms. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. The poet is pointing to his idealistic view of nature and equating it with his spiritual idealism. When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? However, the Christian connotations also contain the implications of sacrifice, death and tragedy; Christ the human sacrifice who look upon himself the sings of the world. The broader point is one that many Christian believers have had to grapple with: if God is all-loving, why did he make such a fearsome and dangerous animal? In what distant deeps or skies. A tiger as we know its characteristics to be is fierce and mysterious.
He wonders if God could really create such a creature or maybe it is a creature produced from a darker source. It was written in all simplicity and undermined the actual purpose of the poem. While the speaker is speaking about a real physical lamb on the surface of it, the subtext of the poem derives from both Christian and classical mythology. The creator has strong shoulders energy as well as art skills and dread feet and hand. Do you know who made you? Icarus flew too near to the sun, because he was enthalled, and maybe he wanted to try to snatch the fire. Innocence is also ignorance of evil; the child is not capable of conceiving evil, whereas experienced men are characterized by the loss of innocence because man can not only conceive evil but also commit it. The symbol here could also stand for the age of innocence, as Blake could see the change as the civilized or developed world was becoming industrialized with machines, mechanized transportation like trains and factories, and people were becoming quite materialistic.
In 1779 he began studying at the Royal Academy and within a year began exhibited pictures there, often with historical themes. The tiger also stands for a divine spirit that will not be subdued by restrictions, but will arise against established rules and conventions. Romantic poetry often dealt with these ideals: innocence and purity, and it used symbols in this way. Lamb is pure, innocent and it is associated with Christ. He questions everything: religion, politics, poetry itself, history, science, and philosophy. Summary The speaker, identifying himself as a child, asks a series of questions of a little lamb, and then answers the questions for the lamb. Little Lamb God bless thee.
On what wings dare he aspire! Obviously, this poem also uses apostrophe to take on its subject, but it has a completely different tone than the 'The Lamb. As a result, what kind of being can be both violent and so magnificent simultaneously? Man believe they deal with the questions… 1288 Words 6 Pages Comparing The Lamb and The Tyger by William Blake In this essay I am going to analyse, compare and contrast two poems by William Blake. Always lurking around, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. Once again the description of the tiger is both concrete because its eyes are bright but the reference to the fire is the allusion to Prometheus and knowledge. William Blake makes a different criticism of society in his four poems The Lamb, The Tyger, The Chimney Sweeper and Infant Sorrow. They seem darker and deeper and just so much more dangerous. Juxtaposition occurs when two ideas are placed side by side that are contrasting.
My initial thought about the first portion referring to Christ as the Little Lamb was incorrect. These two poems are both typical romantic poetry. What dead grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp This stanza questions the steps involved in creation of the all-mighty jungle creature, the tyger. His next poem The Chimney Sweeper has many hidden meaning within his poem about his views on society. Little Lamb who made thee? The poems in Songs of Experience, on the other hand, wrestle with issues of what happens when that innocence is lost. Personal commentary William Blake builds on the general perception that all living entities must reflect its creator in some mannerism. Did he who made the Lamb make thee? The poet addresses lamb itself.
Having such an immature and childish approach to his first set of poems, Blake surely had to have something that was on a higher level of maturity. In other words, that within us is a constant struggle between good and evil. On the other hand, Tyger feet have claws. But not all his poems reflect this. So the setting is in a meadow with a stream, a lovely place to rest, an idyllic setting. But it does not provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in the world. The first stanza focuses on the question of who created the animal and the second contains the answer.
So if the lamb was the symbol of innocence, then the tyger must be, by the subtitle, the symbol of experience. In both poems Blake uses animals and their characteristics to bring across his message, and uses rhetorical questions throughout the poems in order to challenge the reader. And every human, by extension, has aspects about them that can be viewed as both good and evil. Job, too, was confronted by the sheer awe and power of God, who asks the suffering man a similar series of rhetorical questions designed to lead Job not to an answer, but to an understanding of the limitations inherent in human wisdom. Christ was also a child when he first appeared on this earth as the son of God.
Even on its surface level the poem conveys the very spirit of childhood the purity, the innocence, the tenderness, as well as the affection that a child feels for little creatures like the lamb. . The entire first stanza centers on the question of the creator. Lambs denote a gentle animal, harmless to other creatures and humans, whereas tigers are dominant predators that strike fear. Read the first stanza and notice the question Blake is posing. Furthermore, many poems in Songs of Innocence have corresponding paradoxes, or contrasting ideas, in the other works. These combined works were given the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.