Immediately after “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” comes the famous repetition-the lines that constitute the beginning of the poem, that open “The Tyger.” By repeating the lines Blake actually identifies the question’s “thee” and indicates its addressee: it is not a tyger or, worse, a tiger, The “beasts of prey” that appear in chapter 2 of Paley (30-60) are thoroughly symbolic, but those that haunt chapter 16 of Raine (2: 3-31) are not, nor is Peterfreund’s “tiger,” which is reified as the speaker of experience “buys into Newtonian metonymic logic of natural theology” (134 see 134-38).
In fact, sensitivity to the structure of “The Tyger” should suggest one response to this question, which, though seemingly obvious, is seldom, if ever, given. Peterfreund, on the other hand, concludes his “Power Tropes” by considering “the status of question.” Though other questions precede and follow it, critical intuition or simply sensitivity to sense and structure suggests that this is the climax of the poem’s (or indeed the poems’) questioning. Chapter 16 (“The Tyger”) of Raine opens and closes with this question Wagenknecht quotes it near the beginning of his chapter “The Lamb and The Tyger” (80) and then comes back to it repeatedly. For example, Damon pays attention to the question in his monumental William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (277-78), and Paley, in his splendid survey of criticism of “The Tyger” (chapter 2, “Tyger of Wrath,” of his Energy and the Imagination), responds to Damon’s analysis (39) and then refers to the question again in his discussions of “the sublime of terror” and of Los’s furnaces. None of the “duets” Blake included in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience contains more questions than the pair of lyrics that will be the focus of this essay, “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” And none of these questions provokes more critical speculation than the experienced speaker’s “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It is just one of the unanswered queries of “The Tyger,” but it catches the eye and inflames the pen the most.
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