The Tyger and the Maker

William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is fascinating to me for the way it takes an image of the power of nature and turns it into a question about the nature and capabilities of God. The poem's imagery is concise and powerful, with repeated fragments of questions ("What the hammer? What the chain?" and so on) expressing a dismay bordering on delirium at the tyger's horrific nature. Blake then revels in the contradiction between this nature and the idea of a benevolent, loving God, questioning "Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who make the Lamb make thee?" The first of those lines to me is one of the most disturbing in the poem; I cannot help but picture the mentioned smile as not a loving, gentle one, but the unsettling smirk of a tyrannical overlord. I would not go so far as to argue that Blake shared this conception, but his portrayal of God in the poem is certainly far from loving and more awe-inspiring or terrific, in the "terror" sense of the word. The verb "dare" in the final line serves to emphasize the transgression involved here on the part of God (if such a thing is possible).
Another interesting aspect of the poem is the way in which Blake makes use of industrial and mechanical language to describe the tyger, beginning with the contrast between the natural-sounding "forests of the night" and the tyger "burning bright" and continuing through "What the hammer? What the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain?" The third stanza even describes the tyger's body parts in a way that makes it sound like an awful machine, as Blake asks "And what shoulder & what art, / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? / And when thy heart began to beat, / What dread hand? & what dread feet?" The repeated, fragmented questions again emphasize the terror that the tyger inspires, as the picture one gets reading the poem is not a complete picture of an animal but rather an avalanche of fragments, each one leaving the reader too little time to fully process before the next arrives.