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

4 The Miltonic Basis of the Poem (a) Paradise Lost is called by Bernard Blackstone1 "a poem which influenced Blake more than anything outside the Bible itself."2 And critics have noted three kinds of influence by Milton's epic on The Tyger. We may take these as our starting-point. But before we do so a few words will be in place on how the poem of one writer may be related to that of another. The relation between them, no matter how vital, is not always open and full-figured: it is often subtle and embryonic. Not only do basic ideas, images and locutions pass from the earlier writer to the later in a straightforward or an oblique manner: there occur a

INDEX Abdiel, 56, 73, 74, 76, 77, 86, 104, 105 Abrama, M . H . , 42 fn. 127 Adam, 56, 57, 126, 157 Adam and Eve, 54, 99, 107, 157 Ahania, 1 80 Albion, 153, 188, 195-96, 202, 224, 234, 246, 249, 250, 262 Alchemic and Hermetic thought, iii, viii Alchemical philosophy, 27 America, 163, 202, 203 Ancient Mariner, The, 126 "And did these feet in ancient time . . ." (interpretation), 245-53 "Angel Tiger", 42 Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love, 70 fn. 58 Anti-Trinitarianism, 101-02 Arianism, 101 , 102 Arius, 102 Art, Artist, 10, 140, 141 "aspire", 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105, 107, 111 , 129, 226-27, 162 Aurobindo, Sri, 4, 5 B

Postscript Six years after this Preface, Miss Raine's monumental work was published: Blake and Tradition, Two Volumes (Bollingen Series XXXV. 11, Princeton University Press, U.S.A., 1968). In two places in her notes at the end of the work she has done me the honour of referring to my essay. On p. 230 of Vol. I, in the course of her own thesis, she has the statement: "Blake's Tyger is another fiery beast, created in the furnaces of the demiurge by the theft of 'fire,' the solar spiritual principle.78" Her note 78 on p. 407 reads: "K. D. Sethna has written a fine exposition of this theme, still unpublished at the time of writing." Vol. II, p. 5, finds her saying: "If Lamb and Tyg