-10_A Retrospect - the Resolution of The Tyger's Symbolism.htm 7 A Retrospect: The Resolution of The Tyger's Symbolism We have completed our study of The Tyger. We may conclude with a brief retrospect. The starting-point in our treatment of the poem was an analysis of its "Minute Particulars, Organized", and the analysis resolved the poem's symbolism into a mytho-poeic vision of Christ's battle in Heaven with revolted angels. The details of this vision - the ultimate empyrean of the supreme lustre-hidden Godhead, the winged intermediate Creator who is essentially one with that Godhead yet existen-tially secondary and who aspiring from his existential status to the primary blaze and

-09_The Poem in the General Context of Blake's Work.htm 6 The Poem in the General Context of Blake's Work (a) The last stage of our study of The Tyger brings us into the midst of Blake's work in general. We have to support our identification of his beast of prey by whatever links up with our poem from outside it in the context of this work . We shall draw on outside expression to define the various aspects of the poem more clearly or to put our minds in the proper frame to appreciate them. And, weaving everything together, we shall see also what enrichment of detail comes about by taking Blake as a whole. But we shall do so by glancing first at some points from Blake put forwar

2 The Internal Pattern of the Poem The first thing to strike us is that it is not any one part of the Tyger which is said to burn. As Harding1 puts it apropos of the opening phrase - Tyger! Tyger! burning bright - "we may (in view of the second stanza) think primarily of the two burning eyes in the darkness, but the phrase itself makes the whole tiger a symbol of a 'burning' quality..." The Tyger's entire body which in physical fact would not be visible in the darkness is here seen as aflame. Of course, a physical Tiger even at night may be poetically visioned in its ferocity like this, but the sheer totality of the fire tends by itself to sug

BLAKE'S TYGER A Christological Interpretation BLAKE'S TYGER A Christological Interpretation K. D. SETHNA Cover Drawing by Ritam March 1989 © K. D. Sethna Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aurobindo, Sri Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), 1972. The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), 1972. Bateson, F. W. Selected Poems of William Blake, Edited with an Introduction and Explanatory Notes (Heinemann, London), 1957. Blackstone, Bernard English Blake (Cambridge), 1949. Boehme Signatura Rerum and Other Discourses (Everyman's Library, London). Translation by William Law, first published in 4 Vols., 1764-1781. Bowra, E. M. The Romantic Imagination (Oxford), 1957. Brown, Raphael (Translator) The Little Flowers of St. Francis by Brother Matt

Preface This essay in interpretation has grown out of half a dozen talks given during 1959 to students of First Year Arts at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry (South India) in the course of a general study of poetic vision and expression. It is mostly the pursuit, along several ways, of what has seemed to the author a new line of symbolic significance in Blake's intensest lyric, The Tyger. When it touches on the readings attempted by others, the aim has not been to exhaust the whole range of exegesis. As a rule, only those comments which, on coming to hand, have appeared to be immediately relevant as either guiding hints or partial supports or possible o

5 The Poem in Process and in Illustration We come now to a necessary preliminary to the task of setting The Tyger in the general context of Blake's work in order finally to confirm our reading of its symbolism. We shall examine the several alternatives and corrections and additions in Blake's original draft of the poem and then the choice of the ultimate version. Doing so, we shall feel how he has moved towards the deeper meaning and tried at the same time not to lose sight of the physical Tyger altogether but found it as good as impossible to retain any positive phrase about the latter without endangering the supernaturalism of his vision. Nex

Last Words This book, written originally in 1961, has had to wait for more than a quarter century to get published. Although appreciated, it was returned by one publishing company in India because it was judged unlikely to have an appeal wide enough for large sales. My friend Arabinda Basu made an attempt to interest publishers in the U.S.A. An enterprising company received a favourable verdict from one official reader, but a discouraging opinion from another. As the latter may have been more forcefully expressed, no resort was made to a third and final arbitrating assessment. Now at last funds have come for me to bring the book out on my own. My nephew Dr. Ferdauz N. Canteenwalla, pra

APPENDIX A Letter from Kathleen Raine 47 Paultons Square, London S.W.3. 5DT. Feb. 4th, 1979 Dear Mr. Sethna, Please forgive my long delay in replying to your letter and acknowledging your Tyger manuscript. It has been a pleasure to pick up again the threads of our old exchange of ideas, and to see what you have now made of the poem. You may of course be right in seeing the Tyger as the form taken by Jesus the Imagination in the world of Experience. This could very well be so. I liked best of all your first chapter, in which you so minutely and beautifully go through the poem before you begin to look at sources. It is a finely argued reading of the text and imaginat

3 The Internal Pattern and Christian Tradition Now - in addition to the two passages already noted, Eliot's and Smart's - we may attempt a survey of Christian tradition and set forth correspondences to the "Minute Particulars" of The Tyger's symbolism as well as to the lyric's "Vision" as "a perfect Whole" into which they are "Organized". We have found Christ emerging from the internal pattern of the poem as the maker of the Tyger. The very attribution of creativeness to him rather than to God is in complete consonance with Christian doctrine. Christ there is known as the Word of God: he answers to the Greek Logos, the Indian Shabda Br