92POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEof it (as the variant spelling suggests), presumably through Thomas
Bewick’s or Thomas Pennant’s popular late eighteenth-century natural
histories of “quadrupeds.”^17 Unlike in these texts, however, the tiger of
the poem is barely described, paradoxically because the tiger at once
looms so large in the human imagination and because it remains mys-
terious and unknown—just a description and a drawing. In the poem
“fearful symmetry” is its only distinguishing characteristic. The sym-
metry refers presumably to its orange, white, and black striping, as well
as to the more abstract symmetry of its utter contrast to the lamb in the
chain of being. That it is “burning bright / In the forests of the night”
also suggests that it has not been seen by the speaker but exists as a
threat at the edge of apprehension.^18 The question of how the speaker
actually knows the animal and its kind is the poem’s latent puzzle. The
speaker’s questions about the animal are about the broader implica-
tions of its existence—not on what the tiger means to an observer, but
on what its existence as a supreme predator means for an understand-
ing of God:^19 “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” While the
speaker appears to have had his conception of the world overthrown
by a developing understanding of a single species (from an unknown
source), the poem also works to undermine the possibility of understand-
ing the concept of species. This uncertainty is suggested by the fact
that the poem’s central question about who made the tiger remains
dramatically unanswered. The Platonic and Judeo-Christian concept of
species as a set of ideas produced by God, fixed and complete, is itself
threatened by the incomprehensibility of the tiger. Moreover, as has been
widely noted, the multiple images Blake produced of the tiger in his edi-
tions of Songs of Innocence and of Experience are strikingly varied.
While the lambs in Blake’s illustration of that poem are all a part of
a flock of nearly identical creatures (the lamb even appears full grown),
the multiple versions of the individual tiger display dramatic variations
of color (black and white, yellow and black, shades of brown, and other
combinations, including red and purple), size, and facial expression
(smiling, frowning, stunned, and stuffed). These are vivid representa-
tions of individual tigers rather than an attempt to produce a definitive
drawing of the tiger.