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In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger, tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake, The Tyger.59
In this fearful symmetry, all things are ever shrouded or veiled: the lamb and the tyger, God and Satan, good and evil, and are at worst realities, at best, mirages and eidolons, or dreams within infinite dreams, terrors within, signifying both, paradise and expulsion. Shall we then not think of Blake’s categorical Marriage of Heaven and Hell as the antinomy to Milton’s imperious divorce between Heaven’s Harmonium and Pandemonium? Shall we then not ask, “Did He who made the lamb make thee?” Only to be thrown into the labyrinth of logical angst, only to succumb like Sisyphus, before we try once more to roll upwards the mightily burdensome and cursed task?
59 Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. By David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1965. 24.
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