Tyger! Tyger! burning bright...

We learnt in class that one of the keys in Blake’s Song of Experience is to move beyond the painful experience through revolutionary changes. In “The Tyger”, “burning bright”, which appears both at the beginning and at the end, implies this idea.(line 1).

The tiger is depicted as “burning bright” in “the forests of the night”, which suggests darkness. (line 1).The tiger is the brightness in the darkness. However, it is burning, which either can be dying or an essential part of the strengthening process—I ‘m thinking about Flame Hardening, which is described on wikipedia as a process “in which the surface of the steel is heated to high temperatures, then cooled rapidly, generally using water.” Just like heating the surface of the steel to high temperatures harden the steel, burning strengthenes the tiger, if the tiger has a steel nature. In real life, most people have been burned in the furnace of life—we more or less suffer from life. Some people cannot endure the high temperature. They run away from the torture furnace, only to find themselves in the “forests of the night;” that is, darkness. Because of the high temperature, their bodies are still burning and the burning bodies are the only brightness in the dark forests. Thus, enduring the torture is the only way to gain hope in a dark world. You can either go back to the furnace and finish the revolutionary strengthening process, or fade out in the darkness.