One theme of Blake's poem is the mystery of how a God that could create a creature as gentle as a lamb—and identify the lamb with his son, Jesus—could also make a creature as fearful and bloodthirsty as a tiger.
The poem thus explores two sides of God. One side is gentle, comforting, and inviting—like a lamb. The other is sublime: it strikes us with fear and awe.
The tiger, because of the fear it raises in us, is an example of the sublime. The sublime, usually associated with nature, includes those elements of the natural world that are both beautiful and yet fill us with a sense of God's grandeur and vast might. Mighty waterfalls crashing down or the view from icy mountain tops could fill us with a sense of awe and terror. So does Blake's tiger.
In the poem, the speaker wonders why God is both so gentle as to create the lamb and so terrifying as to create a dangerous predator. The poem dwells in the space of mystery, not offering answers but asking questions.
The divine source of creation is a theme in William Blake's poem "The Tyger," keeping suit with Blake's Pre-Romantic aesthetic and simultaneous interest in the Bible and irreverence toward the Church of England.
The poem questions, "What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" In other words, the poet is questioning what kind of god could be responsible for creating a creature who is inherently destructive in nature. This is an especially potent question within the context of the Lamb referenced in the fifth stanza. How could a divine creator create two such seemingly opposite animals--one that is the pinnacle of innocence and one that is a killer? Blake does not provide any answers to these questions, but rather simply opens a dialogue for a discussion of this duality.
This poem is ultimately also a reflection of the limitations of human understanding, particularly as we try to discern the moral questions of good versus evil.
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