The poem is a childs song, in the form of a question and answer.

The first stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual matters and contains explanation and analogy. The childs question is both naive and profound. The question (who made thee?) is a simple one, and yet the child is also tapping into the deep and timeless questions that all human beings have, about their own origins and the nature of creation. The poems apostrophic form contributes to the effect of naivet, since the situation of a child talking to an animal is a believable one, and not simply a literary contrivance. Yet by answering his own question, the child converts it into a rhetorical one, thus counteracting the initial spontaneous sense of the poem. The answer is presented as a puzzle or riddle, and even though it is an easy onechilds play this also contributes to an underlying sense of ironic knowingness or artifice in the poem. The childs answer, however, reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings. The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bibles depiction of Jesus in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence,accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. But it does not provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in the world. The pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is The Tyger; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on religion that includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable. These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account than either offers independently. They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of innocence and experience he projects.

Biography of William Blake

an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself". Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", [6] for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England indeed, to all forms of organised religion - Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Bhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors". William Blake and his works have been extensively discussed and criticised over the twentieth and now this century, however previous to that he was barely known. He first became known in 1863 with Alexander Gilchrists biography Life and only fully appreciated and recognised at the beginning of the twentieth century. It seems his art had been too adventurous and unconventional for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, maybe you could even say he was ahead of his time? Either way, today he is a hugely famous figure of Romantic literature, whose work is open to various interpretations, which has been known to take a lifetime to establish. As well as his works being difficult to interpret, him as a person has also provoked much debate. Henry Crabb Robinson, who was a diarist and friend of Blakes at the end of his life asked the question many students of Blake are still unable to conclusively answer: Shall I call him artist or genius or mystic or madman? (Lucas, 1998 p. 1) Born on 28th November 1757 in Soho in London, he had a grounded and happy upbringing. Although always a well read and intelligent man, Blake left school at the early age of ten to attend the Henry Pars Drawing Academy for five years. The artists he admired as a child included Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio, Romano and Drer. He started writing poetry at the age of twelve and in 1783 his friends paid for his first collection of verses to be printed, which was entitled Poetical Sketches and is now seen as a major poetical event of the 18th century. Despite his obvious talents as a poet, his official profession was as an engraver because he could not afford to do a painters apprenticeship and therefore began his apprenticeship with the engraver James Basire in 1772. After completing his apprenticeship six years later, he joined the Royal Academy of Art. At this point his art and engraving remained separate he wrote and drew for pleasure and simply engraved to earn a living. In 1784 he opened his own shop and in the same year completed Island in the Moon, which ridiculed his contemporaries of the art and literature social circles he mixed with. Two years previous to this, he married Catherine Boucher. Now Blake was an established engraver, he began experimenting with printing techniques and it was not long before he compiled his first illuminated book, 'Songs of Innocence' in 1788. Blake wanted to take his poetry beyond being just words on a page and felt they needed to be illustrated to create his desired effect. Shortly after he completed 'The Book of Thel' and from 1790-3, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', which followed on from his significant Prophetic books. These books were a collection of writings on his philosophical ideas and although they have nothing to do with his poetry, it was a sign of his increasing awareness of the social injustices of his time, which led to the completion of his 'Songs of Experience' in 1794. One of Blakes main influences was the society in which he lived. He lived during revolutionary times and witnessed the downfall of London during Britains war with republican France. His disgust with society grew as he matured and 'The Songs of Innocence and Experience' depict this transition. As well as having radical religious ideas for the time (he did not believe in religion of nature or reason, but thought mans nature was imaginative and mystical (Lister 1968, p.27)), he also had radical political ideas due to the day-to-day

poverty he was forced to witness. Living near the end of a century, born in a period of imperialistic wars, coming to maturity during the American Revolution and to the full bloom of his genius during the French Revolution, aware of impending economic change and sick to the bone of ruling hypocrisy, he viewed the evnts of his own days as the fulfilment of prophecy (Hagstrum 1964, p. 97-98) Blakes preoccupation with good and evil as well as his strong philosophical and religious beliefs remained throughout his life and he never stopped depicting them in his poetry and engravings. He died at the age of sixty-nine in 1827 and although the Blake family name died with him, his legacy as a fascinating, complex man of many artistic talents will no doubt remain strong well into this century. Other famous works include 'Europe', 'America', 'Visions of the Daughters of Albion' and 'The Book of Urizen'. Although Blake is not well known for being a specifically grotesque artist, it is his experiences and disgust with London society in the late eighteenth century that clearly emulates elements of the grotesque. As it would be impossible to discuss all of Blakes works, this study will focus on 'Songs of Innocence and Experience', particularly 'Songs of Experience' to learn how he portrayed his views on society and how the grotesque falls into that.

The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror? The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blakes tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tigers remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speakers questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poems series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the fearful symmetry of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation. The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The forging of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of shoulder and art, as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the heart of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the dare to replace the could of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act. The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of experience and innocence represented here and in the poem The Lamb. The Tyger consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of Gods power, and the inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of The Tyger contrasts with the easy confidence, in The Lamb, of a childs innocent faith in a benevolent universe.