This is an
interesting question, as I have to
say I never thought about the poem in terms of individual
responsibility.
However, the following question runs throughout the poem:
What immortal hand or eye,Could frame
thy
fearful symmetry?This question asks a
monotheistic
God how he could create a creature as fearful and dangerous as a
tiger, with its predatory
ability to devour the innocent. In other words,
what was he thinking, what personal
responsibility was he taking, when he
made this predator?
Since humans are made in the
image of God, and one of our distinctive features is the
ability to create,
the poem implicitly also asks us if we are taking personal responsibility for
what we create. We can create objects that are beautiful and powerful, but we can
also
"twist the sinews of [the tiger's predatory] heart" and make the tiger's
"dread
hand and . . . dread feet."There are
many
ways to read this poem, but one is to liken the creation of the tyger to
that of the factory. In
other words, the tyger is afor the factory. We know
industrialism was making England a very
wealthy nation in this period and
that more and more factories were popping up in once rural
environments. We
know, too, that like most Romantic poets, Blake preferred nature and the
rural
to the industrialized and the urban.This
poem
contrasts with the rural and bucolic setting of "The Lamb," its
companion piece in
Songs of Innocence. Industrial images
that conjure the factory surround the
"tyger. He is forged by "chain," by
"furnace" and "burning
brightly" into the night, as factories would, with
their long shiftsand some went 24 hours
a day.The
poem thus asks, implicitly, what
personal responsibility the creators of
these factories, on the one hand powerful and burning
brightly, on the other
hand grasping and predatory, had towards those workers devoured by their
"tygers?"
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