The Tyger by Blake

First of all, Romanticism needs to be described; therefore we can analyze the Romantic poems relating them to the Romantic ideals. Romanticism was a movement that started the second half of the 18th century in Europe, partly because of the Industrial Revolution. It was a response to the Age of Enlightenment and its ideals of reason and intelligence. Romanticism started to use again emotions as a source of creating art and thinking. It gave a lot of importance to nature, and the emotions of horror and terror. Writers at that time were not afraid to show their emotions to everybody, so they openly expressed themselves how they felt through novels, poems, short stories and songs.
The poem I am going to analyze is “The Tyger” by Blake. The form of the poem is comprised by 6 quatrains, and its couplets rhyme. Its meter is rhythmic and regular.
The poem starts with a question by the author asking who could have created such a beautiful creature. After this question, the poem keeps going with more questions asking why all his parts are that beautiful, and it ends up saying that the tiger is beautiful, but at the same time destructive, which at the first view can seem pretty awkward. The whole poem is asking rhetoric questions that enhance the tiger’s beauty, and asking how it could be so beautiful and destructive at the same time. We can see that the author really thinks that this animal is beautiful, and Blake is not afraid to show his great respect and admiration for it. On the other hand, this beautiful animal also is dangerous and destructive. That’s the reason why he compares it to the lamb, which is a really ugly animal but is really healthy for us, humans. This is a great poem to reflect the Romanticism ideal, because we can see that the author is not afraid or ashamed to tell his feelings about something he thinks is beautiful, and he also enhances the beauty and importance of nature by these two animals (tiger and lamb). Probably, at the Age of Enlightenment,