The Lamb and The Tyger - Songs of Innocence and Experience
The Work
The Lamb and The Tyger appear as paired companion poems in William Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), which were combined in a single volume - Songs of Innocence and of Experience - from 1794. Each copy of the combined book was produced by Blake's unique relief etching technique: he wrote and drew the designs in acid-resistant varnish on copper plates, etched away the background, and then printed and hand-colored each copy individually. No two copies are identical; Blake colored them to suit his vision and each purchaser's character. The book went through more than twenty-eight different printing runs during Blake's lifetime and survives in approximately twenty-eight complete or near-complete copies held in major collections.
Biblical Source
The Lamb directly invokes John 1:29 ('Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world') and Luke 10:21 ('I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children'). The child-speaker asks the lamb who made it and answers that it was made by one who 'calls himself a Lamb,' explicitly identifying the lamb with Christ - meek, mild, and clothed in 'clothing of delight.' The Tyger correspondingly invokes the Creator God of the whirlwind speech in Job 38-39, who made creatures of terrifying beauty and power alongside the gentle: 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' The question is never answered. The poem draws on Revelation 5:5-6, where Christ is both the Lion of Judah and the slain Lamb - the juxtaposition of power and self-giving sacrifice that defines Johannine Christology.
Artist and Commission
Blake produced Songs of Innocence first, selling it independently from 1789 as a children's book with pastoral illustrations. The addition of Songs of Experience in 1794 transformed its meaning: the naive joy of the Innocence poems is recontextualized by the bitter wisdom of Experience, and each poem in one collection has an implicit counterpart in the other. There was no external patron for the combined book; Blake produced and sold it privately, his wife Catherine assisting with printing and coloring. The book was one of the few commercially viable products of Blake's workshop and appeared in his catalogues throughout his career. The poet William Wordsworth called Blake 'undoubtedly a man of genius,' though the two never met.
Iconography
The illustration to The Lamb shows a gentle pastoral scene: a child stands among sheep beside a stream, a farmhouse visible through trees, and the composition breathes the golden warmth of summer afternoon. The lamb of the poem is present among the flock, unremarkable, part of a world of tender mutuality. The illustration to The Tyger varies considerably across different copies, and this variation is itself significant: in some impressions the tiger appears almost comic, small and unthreatening; in others it is massive and dark. Blake's varying treatment suggests deliberate ambiguity - the tiger is simultaneously a creature of actuality and a projection of the imagination, its terror dependent on the beholder's capacity for vision. Several copies show the tiger walking calmly, which readers have interpreted as either sinister or triumphant. The marginal decoration throughout both poems extends their imagery: grapevines, wheat, and children's figures weave through the text, making the entire visual field a theological meditation.
Art Historical Significance
Songs of Innocence and of Experience established the illuminated book as a major artistic form in English culture and influenced the development of artist's books throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The theological and artistic pairing structure - innocence and experience as complementary states rather than sequential stages - was directly influential on Romantic poetics and on later paired-image strategies in art. The book's integration of text and image in a single designed surface anticipated Art Nouveau, the Aesthetic Movement's union of arts, and twentieth-century artists' books. Blake's hand-coloring method means that the book exists in no single authoritative version; it is constitutively multiple, a feature that twentieth-century bibliographers and digital humanists have found philosophically productive.
Theological Interpretations
The theological heart of the paired poems is a question that the Book of Job also poses and never fully answers: how can a single Creator be responsible for both tender innocence and terrifying power? Christian readers have found in the pairing a meditation on the two natures of Christ - Lamb and Lion - and on the paradox of a creation that includes both beauty and predation. The implicit theodicy question is never resolved; Blake's Tyger ends not with an answer but with a reiteration of the original question in the past tense ('Did he who made the Lamb make thee?'), suggesting that the question itself, not any answer, is the appropriate response to the sublime. Some theological readers have interpreted the unanswered question as an argument for apophatic theology - the via negativa in which God exceeds all human categories. Others read it as Blake's critique of a complacent Christianity that domesticates both the terror and the beauty of the divine.
Legacy
The Tyger is statistically the most anthologized poem in the English language and one of the most recognizable texts in world literature. It has been set to music by dozens of composers, illustrated by hundreds of artists, and quoted in contexts ranging from physics (Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have murmured 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds' after the Trinity test - a phrase with Blakean resonances) to ecology. The pairing of the Lamb and the Tyger has shaped two centuries of theological poetry and has deeply influenced how English-speaking cultures think about the problem of evil and the nature of creation. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Seamus Heaney's poetry, and Ted Hughes's Crow all engage directly with Blake's paired vision.
Visiting the Work
The largest collections of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies are held at the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, the Morgan Library New York, and the Library of Congress. The William Blake Archive (blakearchive.org) provides free online access to high-resolution digital facsimiles of all surviving copies, allowing comparison of different colorings and arrangements. Tate Britain holds significant Blake materials and periodically mounts major exhibitions including illuminated books.