Literary Devices in The Tyger

Blake employs both alliteration, or the repetition of consonant sounds, and assonance, or the repetition of vowel sounds, in the poem’s first line. In partnership with epizeuxis, repeating the consonant sounds “t” and “b” and the vowel sound “i” reinforces the poem’s musical rhythm, its emotional intensity, and its striking imagery of the majestic Tyger.

The poem begins with an epizeuxis, or the repetition of words without intervening words in between. Blake’s repetition of the word “Tyger” gives musicality to the text and introduces a mysterious tone. This repetition also suggests that Blake describes all tigers that roam the “forests of the night,” as opposed to a specific one.

The entirety of “The Tyger” is an apostrophe, or an address to something or someone who does not respond. The poem’s speaker asks the Tyger a series of questions about its creator, but the Tyger does not respond. As these questions are directed to an animal that cannot respond, they are rhetorical musings about the nature of creation.

The noun “symmetry” means to be made up of similar or equal parts, usually in an aesthetically pleasing way. The speaker refers to the Tyger’s beauty with a tone of cautious, awed respect by describing its “fearful symmetry.” Unlike the other end rhymes in this poem, “eye” and “symmetry” form a slant rhyme, in which the final consonant is the same but the preceding vowel sounds differ. Marking the word “symmetry” with a slant rhyme—also called an imperfect rhyme—forces the reader to pause and consider the word’s context—“fearful”—carefully.

This line uses anaphora, or the repetition of a word at the beginning of successive lines or phrases. Here, the emphasis made by the repetition of the words “what dread” conveys the emotional intensity of the speaker’s awe at the Tyger’s power. Further, the speaker’s use of the adjective “dread” invokes its verb form, “to dread,” and suggests that he is increasingly afraid of the Tyger’s creator, who would make such a frightening beast.

Subtle changes to the punctuation and diction of the poem’s first stanza prevent this sixth and final stanza from being a perfect replication. The removal of the first line’s comma positions “burning bright” as a necessary characteristic of the Tyger—as opposed to something it happens to be doing in the moment. The semicolon that ends the first stanza’s second line is here changed to a colon, which makes the speaker’s address of the Tyger more pointed and less theoretical. Most striking, the speaker’s question has changed: in the first stanza he seems to be asking who would have the ability to create the Tyger, whereas now he asks who would “dare” to do so.