William Blake

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Along with ‘The Tyger’, perhaps ‘London’ is the best-known of all of the poems by William Blake (1757-1827) which he published under the title Songs of Experience. This volume, which is the companion-piece to his earlier Songs of Innocence (indeed, the two volumes should be viewed as one larger work), sees Blake addressing some of the darker aspects of late eighteenth-century society, such as slavery, poverty, and the deadening effects of industrialisation.

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What are the most important symbols and images in William Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’? The poem is from Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. ‘A Poison Tree’ is a powerful poem about anger, and how anger eats away at us, causing us to behave in deceitful and dishonest ways.

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Along with ‘The Tyger’, perhaps ‘London’ is the best-known of all of the poems by William Blake (1757-1827) which he published under the title Songs of Experience. This volume, which is the companion-piece to his earlier Songs of Innocence (indeed, the two volumes should be viewed as one larger work), sees Blake addressing some of the darker aspects of late eighteenth-century society, such as slavery, poverty, and the deadening effects of industrialisation.

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Tyger’ is one of the best-known poems of the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827), but in many ways it is a mysterious, even inscrutable poem which views the tiger with both awe and horror.

A number of lines in the poem carry the force of an incantation, as if Blake were attempting to summon the tiger forth from those ‘forests of the night’. And although the poem is more questioning and suggestive than it is declarative or definitive on the subject of the tiger, it explores some weighty themes.

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Tyger’ is one of the best-known poems of the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827). The poem, part of Blake’s Songs of Experience, is notable for its series of questions about the large and fearsome creature, the tiger. But it is also a poem built upon a sequence of powerful images and symbols.

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