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Blake's Revisions of The Tyger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martin K. Nurmi
Martin K. Nurmi*
Affiliation:
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio
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Extract

In Blake's Notebook drafts of The Tyger we have a valuable record of the growth of a great poem, a record which not only brings the poem itself into clearer focus but gives us as well another glimpse of the poet during a crucial but scantily documented period of his life. Yet, curiously enough, critics have largely neglected them. The fact that Blake revised this poem more than any other has been noticed, to be sure, and some critics have shown how a line or a stanza in the final poem is an improvement over earlier versions. But only one extended study of the drafts has been made, Joseph Wicksteed's attempt to reconstruct Blake's composition by association of ideas. And that is incomplete: of the three full drafts of the poem (counting the final version as the third), and the additional drafts of two stanzas, Wicksteed studies thoroughly only the first draft and an additional draft of one stanza.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1956 , pp. 669 - 685
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 Blake's Innocence and Experience (London, 1928), pp. 246–251. Stanley Gardner, in Infinity on the Anvil (Oxford, 1954), pp. 123–130, uses the drafts to some extent, to show the greater effectiveness of the final poem.

2 Unfortunately, all published transcriptions of the drafts of this poem are either incomplete, simplified, or silently condensed, including that in Bunsho Jugaku's A Bibliographical Study of William Blake's Note-Book (Tokyo, 1953), which purports to correct previous transcriptions of the Notebook. A photographic facsimile of the Notebook has been published by Geoffrey Keynes, in The Notebook of William Blake (London, 1935), and a facsimile of the section of it containing Songs of Experience by Wicksteed, in Blake's Innocence and Experience. Blake's Notebook is frequently called the Rossetti MS., after D. G. Rossetti, who once owned it.

3 “Symmetry” could, of course, also be taken to refer more generally to the tiger's beautiful shape and harmonious design, but this meaning is not primary, since Blake is less interested in the tiger as a real animal than as a symbol of the coincidence of opposites.

4 I do not advance this as a novel interpretation. Among the critics who interpret the poem as an affirmation are Wicksteed (p. 187); Gardner (pp. 129–130); Mark Schorer, in William Blake: The Politics of Vision (New York, 1946), pp. 250–251; Jacob Bronowski, in William Blake: A Man Without a Mask (London, 1944, 1954), pp. 116, 169; David V. Erdman, in Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954), pp. 179–181. But the opinion that Blake is here probing good and evil is widely held. It is essentially the view expressed by S. Foster Damon, William Blake, His Philosophy and Symbols (London, 1924), pp. 276–278, and is shared by a series of notes in Explicates which attempt to explicate the imagery of the poem, especially that of the 5th stanza. See those by George W. Stone, Jr., Dec. 1942, no. 19; Ralph D. Eberly, Nov. 1949, no. 12; and Frederick A. Pottle, March 1950, no. 39. See also Kathleen Raine, “Who Made the Tyger?,” Encounter, ii (June 1954), 43–50.

5 They come near the end of those Songs of Experience which are written in the Notebook on the same page as the drafts of London, which may refer to the proclamation against seditious writings issued in May 1792 and again in Dec. (Erdman, p. 256), and they precede by 9 pp. the MS. poem usually called Fayette, which describes events in France through 25 Oct. 1792 (Erdman, pp. 167–168 n.). The accepted terminus ad quem for Songs of Experience (except for To Tirzah, added later) is 10 Oct. 1793, when they were advertised in Blake's Prospectus, though not all of the songs may have been included in that edition.

6 See “Proverbs of Hell,” no. 44: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Also the fiery creature appearing “to the east, distant about three degrees” (the distance of Paris from London), which the angel's metaphysics distorts into Leviathan, has a tiger's forehead. (The beast who emerges from the sea in Rev. xiii.2, the most plausible model for this one, was “like unto a leopard,” but had the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion.) Blake's Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1948), pp. 184, 189–190. Unless otherwise indicated, page references to Blake's works will cite this edition.

7 See Erdman, pp. 264, 267–268 n. This same uncertainty is reflected later in Los's ambivalence toward Ore in The Book of Urizen (pp. 230–231) and The Four Zoos (pp. 295–296).

8 Europe, p. 216. Famous exceptions to stars as symbols of repression are illustration xiv to Job, “When the morning Stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy,” where Blake is, of course, illustrating another's work, and the early lyric “To the Morning Star” in Poetical Sketches (1783). On the place of stars in Blake's symbolic cosmography see Damon, pp. 143–144.

9 Erdman, pp. 15, 153, 178–180, 436–437.

10 That this stanza includes an historical meaning has been suggested by Schorer (pp. 250–251) and Erdman (pp. 178–180).

11 As has often been noted, the action of the stars throwing down their spears, both in The Tyger and in v.224 (p. 299) of The Four Zoas —where Urizen recounts his defeat—is related to Milton's account of the war in Heaven. The relation, however, is a complicated one, and in a way inverted. The tiger is not to be equated with Satan-Urizen; he is, if anything, closer to Ore. And the action in The Four Zoas, as the historical allegory in night v makes clear, has also an apocalyptic aspect, in Blake's sense of that term (p. 647), for Urizen is recapitulating the collapse of the hosts of reaction in the American war and after, giving an account that matches the last page of America and the first of Europe (Erdman, pp. 343–349). If we wish a Miltonic-Scriptural equivalent for the tiger, it must be the militant Christ—as the Lamb is the forgiving Christ. Prof. Erdman has called my attention to the fact that the plot of Europe hinges on the distinction between these two aspects of Christ. That the tiger is an active force fighting for “divine humanity” is further shown by Blake's re-use of the action of the Sth stanza, with the actors and mood changed, in night ix of The Four Zoas, where he spells out, as it were, the apocalyptic implications of The Tyger. This time it is the “tygers from the forests” (as well as horses, bulls, and lions) who put aside their weapons. Not, however, in defeat and sorrow, or even in Urizen's mixed mood of repentance, but in the unalloyed joy of victors in the final apocalypse: They “throw away [not down, italics mine] / The spear, the bow, the gun, the mortar”; and, instead of weeping, they “sing” and “sieze the instruments of harmony” (p. 355).

12 All page references to the Notebook cite the MS. pages.

13 Transcribing this stanza, the uppermost entry on the left-hand column of p. 108, would very likely have been Blake's next work on the poem after writing the first draft. This is Wicksteed's opinion (p. 248). Keynes, however, in his printed versions of the Notebook, both in Notebook, pp. 17–19, and in The Writings of William Blake (London, 1925), i, 231–233, places this stanza in the 2nd full draft of the poem, as does Jugaku (p. 81). There is no indication that it belongs there.

14 Blake probably intended tie lines about stars and spears to begin the stanza and supply a context for the other questions even before he wrote them. Coming after the 3rd line, they would not only be badly anticlimactic but would make the stanza shift from the central question implicit in the whole poem, to make the stanza ask whether the creation of the tiger was simultaneous with the stars' throwing down their spears.

15 For what it may be worth as an indication of the importance Blake attached to the ideas introduced in this stanza, this is the only stanza of the drafts which he did not cross out with the vertical lines he used to mark engraved stanzas.

16 These questions are grammatically complete in the versions of the poem given by Benjamin Malkin in A Father's Memoirs of His Child and Allan Cunningham in Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Vol. ii. Malkin gives the line as “What dread hand forged thy dread feet?” (in Arthur Symons, William Blake, New York, 1907, p. 326), and Cunningham, as “What dread hand formed thy dread feet?” (Symons, p. 394). With this and one other less important exception, Malkin's version agrees with extant printed versions, and his alteration of the line may have been approved by Blake, whom he knew personally; Mona Wilson seems certain that Blake did approve it (The Life of William Blake, London, 1948, p. 192). But Cunningham's text of the poem as a whole departs so far from any other version (“spears” become “spheres,” for instance, and the last stanza is omitted altogether) as to indicate that it is simply inaccurate, perhaps written from memory. His version of the lines in question, however, does happen to agree with the only alteration which we know Blake to have authorized, found in one extant issue of Innocence and Experience (copy P in Geoffrey Keynes and Edwin Wolf ii, William Blake's Illuminated Books, New York, 1954, p. 61), in which the last line of the stanza is changed in ink to read, “What dread hand Formd thy dread feet?” All of these alterations belong to a later period. Malkin's Memoirs was published in 1806, Cunningham's Lives in 1830, and copy P of Innocence and Experience is dated by Keynes and Wolf as 1802 or later (p. 52).

17 See especially “The Little Black Boy,” “The Chimney Sweeper” (of Innocence), “Introduction” to Experience, “Earth's Answer,” and “The Voice of the Ancient Bard.”

18 Prelude (1850), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1926), x.41–47.

19 “France: An Ode,” Poems, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, 1912), p. 245.

20 The Ore component of the tiger may be seen in the general similarities between the tiger and Ore in America, who, like the tiger, burns in the night as if he had been forged, glowing “as the wedge / Of iron heated in the furnace” (p. 202), and whose origin is a little ambiguously either in the Satanic deeps or the divine Atlantic mountains (p. 202). Very bloody revolutionary tigers indeed are associated with Ore in Europe, where Enitharmon's premature belief that Eden had come—a situation parallel to Blake's 2nd stage of composition—is shattered by the resumption of strife (p. 219). These tigers, however, are far removed from the tiger of the poem, representing a limit of this use of the symbol by Blake. Blake's later disillusionment with Ore in 1801 (as Napoleon—Erdman, p. 292) is parallel to his use of the “forms of tygers & of Lions” to show men “dishumaniz'd” by war in night vi of The Four Zoas (p. 303).

21 William Blake (London, 1951), p. 54. Margoliouth remarks that the occasion of The Tyger is unknown, but believes that this poem too is occasional (p. 58).

1 “In what” deleted, but deletion line erased.

2 Above “did” is an illegible blotch, perhaps a deletion.