I’ve always wondered why the tiger in Blake’s great poem “The Tyger” is not at all a fearsome looking beast.
Scholarly commentary says the tiger looks confused because it’s “in the forests of the night,” and not enlightened, which seems like a bit of a reach. I used to think it was because Blake had never seen a tiger. In Blake’s time (around 1800) if any city in the world had a zoo with a tiger in it, it would’ve been London. So now I’ve come around to thinking that, although he was a brilliant poet, Blake was a pretty primitive artist.
