Essay about William Blake

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William Blake is known now as one of the most highly recognized figures of the Romantic Age for his poetry and visual arts. Unknown during his lifetime, Blake has now become an iconic figure. His personal beliefs are easily revealed through his poetry and are considered extremely debatable; such as his views of Christianity. Nevertheless, Blake is widely read and criticized by modern-day scholars. One of Blake’s best known works, Songs of Innocence and Experience, features the eminent poem “The Tyger”. His poem, “The Tiger”, presents a question that represents the significant theme: Who created the tiger? Was it the kind and loving God? Or was it Satan? Blake presents his question in lines 3 and 4:
What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Blake realizes, of course, that God made all the creatures on earth. However, to express his confusion that the God who created the gentle lamb also created the terrifying tiger, he includes Satan as a possible creator while raising his rhetorical questions, especially the one he asks in lines 5 and 6: In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thy eyes?

Deeps appear to refer to hell and skies to heaven. In either case, there would be fire--the fire of hell or the fire of the stars. Of course, there can be no contradiction that the tiger symbolizes evil, or the personification of evil. Blake's inquiry is a variation on a logical and religious question: Why does evil exist in a universe created and ruled by a kind God? Is it possible that the same God who made the lamb also made the tiger? Or was the tiger the devil's work? The poem is more about the creator of the tiger than it is about the tiger itself. In contemplating the terrible fierceness and awesome symmetry of the tiger, the speaker is at a loss to explain how the same God who made the lamb could make the tiger. Hence, this theme: humans are incapable of fully understanding the mind of God and the mystery of his creation. There are three other works that demonstrates the symbolization of the Tyger: “The Lamb” by William Blake, “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Maya Angelou “Phenomenal Woman”. The conflict between the forces of good and evil is a classic theme in literature of all time periods. In “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and “The Tyger” by William Blake, there are many similarities that could lead one to conclude that the Tyger, in William Blake’s poem, is transformed into the devil
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