The Least Terrifying Tiger in Literature

A Poetry Tale about William Blake, told by Hello Doggo.

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.” You know the one. Fearful symmetry. A beast forged with a hammer, a chain and a furnace, by a creator with nerves of steel.

Now look at the tiger William Blake actually drew underneath it.

He’s quite small. He’s standing politely beside a tree. And his expression is — how to put this — mild. Faintly bewildered. You could, at a push, imagine offering him a biscuit.

And there’s no blaming an illustrator. Blake wrote the words, designed the picture, etched the plate and printed the page, in about seventeen ninety-four, with the colour added by hand — by William, or possibly by his wife Catherine.

So was he simply not very good at tigers? Was it a joke? Or a riddle to match the poem’s great question: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Here’s the honest answer. Nobody knows. As far as anyone can tell, Blake never explained it, so every confident explanation you’ll hear is a guess.

But here’s a lovely footnote. In December twenty twenty-five, a first-issue print of The Tyger sold at Christie’s in London for more than two hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds, reported as a record for a single Blake print. And one of its previous owners, according to Christie’s, was Kenneth Grahame. The man who wrote The Wind in the Willows.

Which feels exactly right. Of all the beasts in English poetry, this is the one tiger you could safely invite to tea with Ratty and Mole.