How
do the poems ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’ express two opposite sides of the human
soul? Answer with textual references./ Compare and contrast ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’.
In
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience, he creates a
series of poems that contrast one another such as “The Lamb” which describes an
innocent, child-like view of the world and “The Tyger” which describes a more
mature world-view. In Blake’s poem “The Lamb,” he has an innocent child
speaking to a lamb about God and the wondrous gift of life that the lamb has
received and how the Son of God is also called a Lamb. Blake uses this innocent
and joyous conversation to portray the infinite goodness of God as seen through
the worshipful eyes of a child. In contrast, Blake’s poem entitled “The Tyger”
is questioning why the God who made the gentle lamb would also make such a
ferocious creature as the Tyger. Instead of the stated assurance of the child
in “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” is a constant questioning with no hints of the
innocence in the previous poem. The speaker of “The Tyger” is more mature in
the words picked to describe the Tyger while the word choice in “The Lamb” is
more artless. The differences in William Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” are
shown by the innocent child speaker in “The Lamb” and the more mature speaker
in “The Tyger” in which contrasting techniques are used to juxtapose the two
poems: the simpler sentence structure used in “The Lamb” and the more
complicated rhetorical questions used in “The Tyger”; the ingenuous word
choices in “The Lamb” and the more sophisticated ones in “The Tyger”; and the
literal assurance of the child in “The Lamb” that God is the Creator and the
lack of an answer for a creator in “The Tyger.” “The Lamb” is indeed a Song of Innocence while “The Tyger” is a
Song of Experience.
