ABSTRACT

The question of good and evil, which forms the theme of the Marriage, was likewise the inspiration of The Tyger, written about the same time. That grand incantation of rhetorical questions which makes up the substance of Blake's most famous poem may seem to require no answer. In The Lamb Blake is describing the eternal world of light, in The Tyger the dark world of "Hell, or energy"—"nature," as Boehme understood it. There is a passage in Europe that illuminates many of the themes of The Tyger. The shadowy female, who is nature, laments that she must generate, in the "nether abyss" of the alchemists, creatures who are the progeny of the "Starres Above." There is reason to believe that The Tyger was written under the immediate excitement and delight occasioned by Blake's reading of Everard's translation of the Hermetica, The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus.