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“The Tyger” consists of six quatrains, each of which is organized into two rhyming couplets. Taken together, these six quatrains offer something like a narrative of creation. That said, because the speaker proceeds by asking questions rather than by telling a story, the narrative is somewhat indirect. Even so, the speaker moves systematically through several aspects of the creation process, outlining an implied narrative. This narrative begins in the opening paragraph, where the speaker starts with a broad query about what kind of creator would be capable of creating a fearsome creature like the tiger. This line of questioning continues in the second stanza by asking where the tiger came from and how it came to be the way it is. Despite these questions about the tiger, the speaker’s emphasis on creation already contains a sly suggestion that he or she is more interested in the tiger’s creator than in the tiger itself. The speaker makes this interest clearer in the third stanza, by shifting the focus of the questions to the nature of the tiger’s creator. In the fourth stanza, the focus shifts again, this time from the creator himself to the workshop where he supposedly fashioned the tiger.

The fifth stanza marks a major turning point, where the speaker’s perspective widens out. Here, the speaker asks how the creator felt about his creation once he finished forging it (lines 17–20):

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The language here subtly echoes the Book of Genesis. That book, which opens the Bible, recounts the process by which God created the world. Throughout this book, the speaker notes how, at every stage in the process of making the world, God gazed upon his creation and “saw that it was good.” In a similar way, Blake’s speaker wants to know whether the creator of the tiger stood back and saw that it was good. If so, then the speaker also wants to know whether the same creator who made the fearsome tiger could have made the gentle lamb. If the same creator made both creatures, then he is capable of bringing vastly different things into the world. This question leads the speaker back, in the final stanza, to where they began. Here, though, they are slightly more aggressive with their questioning, no longer asking simply who could (line 4) be able to create the tiger, but who would dare (24) to do so.

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