SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN READINGS

Similarities and Differences in Readings Related To Nature

Similarities and Differences in Readings Related To Nature

Understanding William Blake's "The Tyger"

To understand "The Tyger" completely, you need to understand Blake's emblems. One of the central themes in his foremost works is that of the Creator as a blacksmith. This is both God the Creator (personified in Blake's myth as Los) and Blake himself (again with Los as his alter-ego.) Blake recognized God's creative method with the work of an artist. And it is art that brings creation to its fulfillment -- by displaying the world as it is, by sharpening perception, by giving form to ideas.

Blake's article of creation differs from the Genesis account. The well known world was conceived only after a cosmic catastrophe. When the life of the spirit was reduced to an ocean of atoms, the Creator set a limit underneath which it could not worsen more distant, and started conceiving the world of nature. The longer books that Blake composed describe Los's creation of animals and people inside the world of nature. One especially mighty passage in "Milton" describes Los's family weaving the bodies of each unborn child.

In believing that creation pursued a cosmic disaster and a drop of religious beings into matter, Blake recognizes Gnosticism, a multi-faceted religious movement that has run aligned to mainstream Christianity. Unlike most other Gnosticizes, Blake considered our own world to be a fine and magnificent place, but one that would ultimately give way to a refurbished universe. Blake accepted that his own visions, which encompassed end-of-the- world images and occasionally a sense of cosmic oneness, prefigured this, and that his art would help lift others "to the perception of the infinite." For Blake (and for numerous, if not most, mainstream Christians), the reason of creation is as a location for our own growth, in groundwork for the starting of our genuine lives. Although the natural world contains much that is mild and blameless ("Songs of Innocence"), those who are skilled with life ("Songs of Experience") understand that there is also much that is awful and frightening. (The "fearful symmetry" might be that of the lamb and the tiger, innocence and experience.)

Casual book reader or student does not have to realize Blake's mystical-visionary convictions to appreciate "The Tyger". For the casual book reader, the verse is about the question that most of us asked when we first perceived about God as the benevolent creator of nature. "Why are there bloodshed and pain and horror?"If you're like me, you've perceived diverse answers that are obviously not true. "The Tyger", which really finishes without a response, is (on this grade) about your own know-how of not getting an absolutely satisfactory response to this absolutely vital question of faith.

There is more. "The Tyger" is about having your cause swamped at once by the attractiveness and the repugnance of the natural world. "When the stars threw down their spears / and watered paradise with their tears" is the most tough part ...