“The Tyger” by William Blake has been one of my favorite poems from the first time I read it at around 7-years-old. Though I didn’t know the words for it at the time, the trochaic meter and rhyming couplets made the 24 line poem feel very fast and snappy. What I love about the poem to this day is how it is very intuitive to understand, but still leaves many layers to be unraveled. As a young girl I was able to understand that it was about a person asking how the same God who made all the wonderful and gentle things in the world had it in him to create a creature as vicious as a tiger. But looking at it now, with greater age and knowledge of its companion poem, “The Lamb,” it is clear the poem holds more complexities. While “The Lamb” is written from the perspective of a young child who is too innocent to realize that a lamb will be slaughtered, “The Tyger” is written by a child old enough to question the will of God.

Another part of the poem I quite like is that at the end of the first and last stanzas, the narrator asks “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry,” which brings symmetry to the poem as a whole, which is immortal. It brings up an idea that poets are immortal, and perhaps frames God himself as a poet of the world.