The Tiger
Tiger tiger burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes
On what wings dared he aspire
What the hand dared seize the fire
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart
Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the lamb make thee
Tiger tiger burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Dared frame thy fearful symmetry
Robert Graves
Even the most cursory glance will reveal some fundamental differences between the above two poems. Graves’ rewrite came about due to a number of flaws he felt existed in Blake’s poem. He writes of these in ‘Tyger, Tyger’, an essay collected in The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects. In the essay, Graves is particularly scathing of Blake’s tendency to mix his tenses, remain ‘imprecise and ambiguous’, ‘grammatically incoherent’ and to not care about the rhetorical focus of the poem.
More importantly, however, Graves neglects at any time to mention that he has ‘made his own arrangement of The Tyger’. After interviewing Graves, Christopher Burstall claims that Graves’ ‘arrangement’ includes ‘cutting out two verses and putting the whole poem in the past tense’, so that it is grammatically correct and more structurally cohesive. Read more…
A Collaboration of Unlike Minds: Robert Graves’ and William Blake’s The Tyger
Copyright © R J Dent (2007 & 2016)
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