tyger and the lamb
William Blake's semantic development of the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience can be measured through an analysis of the apparent dichotomies inherent in his archetypes. Innocence and Experience each assume polarized roles of Mankind's place in God's universe and of the ability of Mankind to achieve its own salvation through the anagogic principles set forth by the Creator. They accomplish this goal in concert with one another, rather than in opposition. To explain this paradox, it is necessary to understand Blake's concept of the Divine, which is explicit in his poem from Songs of Innocence entitled "The Divine Image," wherein he states that, regardless of our faith, or the rituals we use to express our faith, we all, ultimately, pray to the highest virtues within ourselves. Divinity, to Blake, lies within us, where God is Man, and Man, his own God. Yet, at the very core of his humanism, Blake devoutly professes his faith in the Christian concept of God, establi!shing himself under the dubious appellation of Christian-humanist, a term which is itself paradoxical, but which serves the same complementary roles as do those of Innocence and Experience. It is within this construct that the archet
This examination of Blake's Songs leads me to the conclusion that Innocence and Experience are merely metaphysical points, like binary stars, revolving around one another along the journey to salvation, which is nothing greater than a return to the divinity from which we originally came. It is to pass out of Eden and into the world of men, and once there to simultaneously confront the Tyger and protect the Lamb and to confront the lamb and create the Tyger, and in so doing prove ourselves of the same mettle as the Creator who forged us, in order to return to the higher state of Innocence promised within God's flock. The archetypes of man's dual nature--manifested through this symbiosis of wrath and tenderness--as represented in the Tyger and the Lamb are interchangeable, as the Tyger, created by the Lamb, can be meek, and the Lamb, who created the Tyger, terrifying. The salvation of Mankind rests in the recognition of this mutability of God's nature, which provides a key to u! nderstanding the processes inherent in reconciling that nature with our own, for God's nature is a part of our own that can be expressed through our own divinity--an idea that is grotesque only in its unconventional humanistic outlook on the promise of Christianity. re that could be created by God's hands alone, but one so destructive that it had to be built through the industrial process of the forge, with a hammer, a chain, a furnace, and an anvil. This was a beast that was so dangerous, that after it was loosed upon the world, "the stars threw down their spears/ And water'd heaven with their tears" (17-8), which prompts the Bard not to ask, but to demand, "Did [God] smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" (19-20). "God wanted this?" the Bard seems to ask. It is the same question Robert Frost would later ask in "Design," when he wondered if "design govern in a thing so small" as the fate of a spider and a moth. What Frost did not explicitly consider was that the spider has to eat, too, and is equally a part of God's brood of children, just like the Tyger that can destroy the sanctity of the Lamb's Eden and has the power to disperse the flock and drive all of God's gifts away from them. However, the answer to this pow! Blake, William. Templates of "The Lamb" and "The Tyger." The William Blake Archive. Ed. by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 1999. nce, the Bard admits to knowing that God's forge must exist somewhere in the "distant deeps or skies" (5), but that the assembly of such a beast goes so against the image of the meek child-God of "The Lamb" that it must have been completed in separate and distinct parts. In fact, the poet's vision of the Creator is constantly shifting in this poem to itself consisting of disembodied parts, a "hand [that] dare[s] to seize the fire" of the Tyger's pelt and of the forge (8), a shoulder that "could twist the sinews of [the Tyger's] heart" (10), a "dread hand" that could form such "dread feet" (12), and a "dread grasp" (15) that could hold the beast once formed. The Creator becomes the God of the Old Testament who terrified Nebuchadnezzar with a hand writing on a wall, who turned Moses' hair white with a mere view of his backside, whose awesome power is so complete that he physically does not have to be complete to wield the smallest fraction of it. Even then, this was not a creatu! innocence can only be maintained within certain parameters. The use of a child as prophet echoes the words of Christ that no one can come to him except like a child, devoid of the barriers of suspicion and guile, making sense of the youth's observation, "I a child & thou a lamb," where one provides protection, but both are equally protected. The lamb, the child, the shepherd and the prophet all evolve into the same archetype of godlines
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2562
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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