Meditation on The Tyger
Experimental - still figuring out what topics will work for me here...
When I'm meditating, often thoughts arise, the thought starts to think me, and I get swept down a compelling chain of association. I remind myself it's not helpful to view this as a failure; just return to the breath. And sometimes these thoughts are worthwhile enough to make note of. That happened yesterday. But first some background.
At seven, when my sons Leo and Oliver wanted bicycles, I asked them each to memorize and recite ten poems first. At their age, I had copied out passages and learned them at the Carroll School in London, and I always thought this was a wonderful way to learn to read and write.
We started with The Tyger by William Blake, published in 1794. Blake begins his poem with an invocation of the majesty and terror of the Tyger in the forest:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Blake asks, nine separate times, using language evocative of how God speaks to Job about his incomprehensible power to make Leviathan: what Power could create a Tyger?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
After this paeon to the sublime Tyger and his Maker, the poem takes a surprising swerve, as Nature itself cries out in grief, to ask how a Power that makes the gentle and innocent could also choose to make something so ruthless and predatory:
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Having raised the question of theodicy, the poem ends abruptly, repeating its first stanza:
Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The boys loved the poem, and the other poems too. They got their bikes, and they grew up to be writers, and Blake deserves at least a little bit of the credit, along with Shakespeare and Yeats and Tennyson and Robert Lewis Stevenson.
I first encountered The Tyger in my father's laboratory. I had just learned how to read. It was one of only two texts pinned to the bulletin board over his desk. (The other was a quote from Dr. Zhivago, "Even the strong are ruled by the weak and treacherous." Both made a strong impression on me).
There in my father's lab, full of blinking oscilloscopes and bundles of wires, I thought: Scientists are drawn to the world's mysteries and try to understand them. So I first understood Blake's poem as being about the beauty and mystery of a Nature that could make a Tyger.
Tygers are cool. Their "symmetry" I read as grace and beauty. I felt the Tiger's hypnotic energy in the driving rhythm: "Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night."
Years later, in north India, on the outskirts of the Corbett Nature preserve, my brother and I stood over the corpse of a water buffalo that had just been mauled and partly eaten by a tiger. We had driven eight miles down a dirt track, parked when the road ended and walked up a narrow path to reach this isolated indigenous village, where the thatched huts had a design that hadn't changed for 8,000 years. Along with a few melancholy villagers, we stared into the surrounding forest. We knew the tiger wanted to return to his kill and was waiting for us to leave. I couldn't see the tiger but it was very close. We had no weapons. I could feel him watching me. That visceral feeling, that's the Power of the Tyger. Blake got it right.
My first reading was shaped by admiration for my father. I didn't really understand the part about the stars crying and throwing down their spears until I was a lot older. Then, exposed to English literature classes, I got the normative reading of the poem. The Tyger is a metaphor for the predatory and destructive aspect of creation. To the lamb, the Tyger is evil. But the Tyger just is.
Then I appreciated why the stars are saddened by this truth, and throw down their spears and weep because they want no part of such a broken cosmos.
Blake had direct perception that good and evil are inseparable.
That fact, not the Tyger, is his "fearful symmetry."
Organized religion in Blake's 18th century England had no room of course for this type of heresy, which made Blake an outsider - a mystic, a gnostic, an esoteric writer. But Blake is a genius, and had a near-Hindu understanding of the mutual co-arising - the co-equal ethical status - of the three great aspects of all divinity: Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer.
But I'm here to tell you about yet a third reading of the poem, which occurred to me yesterday.
In esoteric literature, every character represents a different aspect of ourselves, fragments of our own divided psyche.
Read Shakespeare this way and it's a revelation.
So in my mind I returned to the poem from an esoteric perspective.
We ourselves are the forests of the Night, where the Tyger at once hides and brightly burns.
The Tyger is beautiful and admirable and awe-inspiring. The Tyger is a killer. The Tyger is force with grace. And this is in each of us, just as much as the lamb. I may wish to turn away from this truth. The shining stars -- the better angels of our nature -- are appalled, and the lamb in us refuses to accept it, but the Tyger is essential.
The Tyger is most dangerous when we deny him his due. Then we become enamored of the Tyger in others, and lose our way. Then, we instinctively admire the Tiger when we see it in the world, because we see openly expressed an unacknowledged aspect of ourselves. This chasing after the Tyger is hypnotic and delusional and self-destructive.
I don't mean to get weird, but the way to free ourselves from the Tyger in the world is to make peace with the Tyger in ourselves. That was yesterday's meditation.
The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger, Tyger, 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 dare he aspire
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? And what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Beautiful Daniel. Made me think of a wise saying from a friend. While a boxer who denies, buries, their fear before going into a boxing match will likely lose, as fear will ambush them in due time, those who embrace their fear, accept it as a fact, then use that fear to allow the Tyger to take control, will always win the match.
Typo “for the us leave.”
One of my very early poems, via mom.
My childhood bedroom had been the study of a grad school contemporary of my parents, Don Hirsch, the deliberately normative critic who lost his tenure race to Harold Bloom. To his credit, ED Hirsch came to view his normative drive as not the way things are, but one way things can be taught. Harold of course became the closest I came to normative criticism, with his preposterous assertions of authority. But also an advocate and model of cabalist reading, asserting that as you do here within a Protestant tradition. Yes indeed, assimilate the Tiger. What I have done with my Marines and SF. But lately I am accepting the jerk. Oh, you have often been a jerk, I say to myself. It’s human. Let it go.