What is the theme statement for William Blake's "The Tyger"?

Blake's "" appears in his Songs of
Innocence and Experience as a song of "experience." These poems appear to be nursery
rhymes, but in fact the idea at work behind Blake's "innocence and experience"
dichotomy has to do with the nature of good and evil, and God's relationship to man.

In the case of "The Tyger," the theme is essentially expressed as a question
in the first stanza, "What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
(l. 2-4) In other words, what are we mortals to infer about God (the "immortal hand or
eye") given the dreadful nature of the tiger?

The next three stanzas
simply rephrase this question over and over, with ever escalating language. The images in this
section of the poem compare God to a blacksmith, fashioning the tiger (and, presumably, all
creation) at the forge:

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp? (l. 13-16)

Stanza five turns the question around, asking to know if God "smiled his work to
see," suggesting that might have taken a perverse joy in creating a deadly animal. The
final stanza returns to the question posed originally, only rephrasing it as "What immortal
hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" By substituting the word "dare"
for the more neutral "could" of the first stanza, the poet clearly is expressing
outrage at the existence of evil in the world, and challenging the moral authority of
God.