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 120 Line 14).
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 (Blake 130
Line 20). 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.
In Blake’s “The Lamb,” there is
simplicity in how the child speaks. The child is speaking to an actual lamb
asking it in the beginning if the lamb knows how it came to be made: “Little
Lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?” (Blake 120 Lines 1-2).
The use of the literary device called apostrophe adds to the tone that this
poem is being spoken by a child since the child seems to feel no embarrassment
in talking to an animal or that there is something slightly ridiculous in
speaking to one either as perhaps an older person might feel. The simplistic
sentence structure also utilizes repetition in the first and second couplets of
each of the two stanzas which lend the poem a sense of a child’s “sing-song”
type of rhythm.
