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Blake wrote “The Tyger” in quatrains consisting of rhyming couplets. Each stanza, therefore, follows the same simple rhyme scheme: AABB. All the rhymes in the poem fall on the final stressed beat of each line, and they are all exact. The only possible exception to this rule might be the rhyme between “eye” and “symmetry,” which occurs in both the first and last stanzas (lines 3–4 and 23–24). In modern English pronunciation, these words don’t quite rhyme, since the -try ending of “symmetry” doesn’t ever sound like “eye.” However, in Blake’s own time, pronunciation was flexible enough to make these words rhyme. With that in mind, all the rhymes in “The Tyger” may be considered both regular and exact. Furthermore, because they are organized into couplets, the rhymes contribute to the childlike, sing-song quality of the poem as a whole. This quality is, of course, a bit of a ruse, since the poem’s themes aren’t childlike at all. In this way, Blake plays with the tension between youthfulness and maturity, which is the hallmark of the larger collection from which this poem comes: Songs of Innocence and Experience.

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