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Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?
In “The Tyger,” as in most of the poems in
Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and usurious hand? Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty!
“Holy Thursday” in
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
In “London,” Blake uses the voice of a prophet-bard to speak out against evil. The meter and rhyme scheme are regular, but the poem reads more like a march or protest song than a hymn or ballad. An effective rhetorical device, the repetition of words enhances the martial tone. Blake capitalizes “Man” and “Infants” to show that individual beings in the poem stand for humanity as a whole. His righteous anger comes from his vision that the forces that make people weak and fearful originate in the human mind. The words “ban” and “manacles” serve as reminders that those forces include human laws.
Read more about the theme of evil in Robert Browning’s poetry.
