I caught a reference to William Blake‘s “The Tyger” in, of all things, a graphic novel I was reading. I recognized it, having read it a long time ago, and recalled it’s elegant way of contrasting the beauty and the ferocity of the animal. I wanted to read the whole thing and learn a little more. Discovered that the poem was in a collection of poems intended to be song lyrics, called Songs of Experience. A previous poetry collection of Blake’s was the Songs of Innocence and contained the sister poem “The Lamb“.
A theme in much of Blake’s work was his philosophy of “contraries”: The belief that the struggle of humanity is based on the concept of the contrary nature of things, and thus, to achieve truth one must see the contraries in innocence and experience. I like the idea and to keep it in my mind and more easily “see” the contrast I decided to list both poems and his original plates here, side by side.