In literature, due to biblical influence, it is common for God to be portrayed as a powerful but gentle being who created all the good things in the universe. William Blake, influenced by the cruel and putrid living conditions of his childhood in the throes of Industrial Revolution, dares to look at God not only as the good God, but also as the God who is the creator of great evil. Blake, in his poem The Tyger, reveals to the reader by using metaphorical language and descriptive imagery the divine savagery that God is capable of.
This divine savagery is presented to the reader metaphorically by comparing God, the powerful creator, to a blacksmith, while the fiery Tyger, around which the poem is centered, is the darkness of the human soul. The poem begins with the speaker questioning the origins. He asks the Tyger "What immortal hand or eye. / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" hoping to comprehend what terrible power created it. The speaker questions, as if awestruck, on the origins of the Tyger. He asks: "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" wondering where in the universe could the Tyger's eyes have been created and who dared handle that fire. "And what shoulder, & what art, / Could twist the sinews of thy heart," questions the speaker, pondering what kind of physical strength is required to realize such a terrible beast. Then he asks the creature "And when thy heart began to beat. / What dread hand? & what dread feet?" hoping to understand that once the terrible creature was created, how its creator could still continue with his job. . This clearly illustrates that the Tyger was created deliberately. Then, Blake writes: "What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp. / Dare its deadly terrors clasp?" Here, he compares the divine creator of the fearsome Tyger to a blacksmith, using vocabulary that one associates with the trade: hammer, anvil, chain, and furnace.