Please offer a critical appreciation of William Blake's poem "The Tyger."

I appreciate (pun intended) your interest in a “critical
appreciation” of William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.”  Too often these days, there is such
a strong stress on extracting “meaning” from a poem that there is too little emphasis on
appreciating a poem’s skill, craftsmanship, and beauty.  If Blake’s primary purpose had
been to express a particular “meaning,” he could easily have written an essay.  Instead,
he chose to write a poem – a use of language in which writers call strong attention to
language itself.

Therefore, in trying to answer your
question, I will try to call attention to some of the specific
literary devices used in this poem and will be concerned only
secondarily with the poem’s “meaning.” Of course, literary techniques cannot be divorced
from literary meaning; form and content and finally inseparable. Nevertheless, let’s try
to concentrate here on your word “appreciation.”  There is much indeed to appreciate in
this poem, including the following:

• The heavy
  alliteration of line 1: “Tyger!
  Tyger!
  burning
  bright!


• The
  ominous imagery of line 2: “In the forests of the
  night . . . .”


• The fact that the
  next two lines do not merely make a statement but rather pose a question that forces the
  reader to think:

readability="7">

What immortal hand or
eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(3-4)

• The fact
  that the next two lines (5-6) echo the structure of lines 3 and 4 (both sets of lines
  are two-line questions), thus contributing to the poem’s unity and
  symmetry.


• The fact that the questions become shorter and
  more rapid in lines 6-7, thus contributing to the increasingly urgent pace of the
  poem.


• The fact that line 9 is nicely balanced in
  structure: “And what shoulder & what art . . .
  .”


• The fact that Blake in line 10 uses assonance, just as
  he elsewhere uses alliteration: “Could
  twist the
  sinews of thy heart . . .
  .”


• The fact that lines 9-10 and 11-12 are balanced pairs
  of questions that look back to the similar balance of lines 3 and 4 and also lines 5 and
  6, not to mention the different kind of balance achieved in the single-line questions of
  lines 7 and 8.


• The fact that line 12 echoes the structure
  of line 9 and thus gives an even greater sense of balance, order, and symmetry to the
  poem than it had already achieved.


• The way the flood of
  short, urgent questions (such as those in line 13) contribute to the rapid rhythm of the
  poem.


• The way lines 15-16 combine two earlier kinds of
  question-asking (brief and longer).


• The way lines 17-18
  provide a bit of a break from all the questions, so that the poem does not seem
  monotonous and predictable.


• The symmetry of lines
  19-20.


• The way the final stanza echoes the opening stanza
  (thus adding to the poem’s symmetry) while also making a suggestive and significant
  change (from “Could” to “Dare” [4, 24]).

This
kind of close reading of the poem helps call attention to many of the features of the
work that make it a piece of literature, not merely a
propagandistic expression of a pre-packaged idea.