When William Blake (1757–1827) printed his “Songs of Experience” in 1794, it was as an answer and a companion to his 1789 “Songs of Innocence.” Thus, for example, The New York Sun has offered his two Holy Thursday poems, one of bright innocence and one of grim experience. Along the way, the Poem of the Day has linked “The Ecchoing Green” and “London,” and looked at “The Fly.”

Whenever Blake is mentioned, experience’s tyger is linked to innocence’s lamb. And obviously so: Both “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” query their animals about creation: the tyger’s question “What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” in parallel to “Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee.”

And yet, in certain ways, “The Tyger” is a more complete poem than its sister, “The Lamb.” Certainly it has always been more anthologized, occupying a bigger place in public memory. But the poem also seems closer to the uniting of experience and innocence that is the mature form of life. In tetrameter couplets broken into four-line stanzas, Blake gives a vision of creation as a Hephaestus hammering out the living.

The “burning bright” in the first line, describing the orange striped beast in the forest, explodes in the following stanzas to a blacksmith and a foundry: “What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain?” The angels water heaven with their tears, but the fires of the Creator are unquenched: “Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”