Evolve

Tygers 

Rev. Ron Sala, October 7, 2001 

 

You may have seen a list of famous Unitarian Universalists someplace or other. We have lists on tee shirts, coffee mugs, and websites. There are a lot of names on those lists, people with varying degrees of UU connection: Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, etc., etc. Many of us though, are still dissatisfied and carry around in our heads a list of people we wish were UU’s but weren’t or aren’t. Some of mine are Walt Whitman, John Lennon, Garrison Keilor, and Alanis Morisette. Also high on my UU wish-list would be William Blake. Why Blake? One reason is that, like a lot of us Unitarian Universalists, Blake wasn’t afraid of a little, shall we say, creative contradiction. Professor Alfred Kazin writes,

Blake was a lyric poet interested chiefly in ideas, and a painter who did not believe in nature. He was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion. He was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search. He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals. He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself “a mental prince” and was one.1

It was clear from the very start that William Blake was different. When he was only four, “he screamed because he saw God put his forehead against the window. At eight, when he was walking in the fields, he beheld ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough with stars’.”2 Maybe the fact that Blake’s family was Swedenborgian played a role in these visions. Emanuel Swedenborg had based his New Church on similar experiences of his own. Perhaps such spiritual events would be more available to us if our society didn’t convince us they were impossible or unreal. Blake seemed to think so.

In any case, all his life, the visions would be an impetus toward a creativity that was not expected or even welcome in a lower middle class Londoner of the turn of the nineteenth century. He had only a very small readership in his lifetime. Part of this had to do with his innovative technique of publishing his poems with his own hand-colored illustrations. Consequently, his books were too expensive for mass consumption and the few who could afford them rarely appreciated them. Robert Graves wrote that Blake wanted a poetic disciple but that no one of his generation understood him. In fact, most of his fellow artists regarded him as little more than a harmless crank.

Perhaps it was this artistic isolation that spoke to Jim Morrison, the likewise misunderstood lead singer of the Doors, who idolized Blake and named the band after one of his verses. Like the Doors sang, “People are strange when you’re a stranger,” and Blake’s and Morrison’s tortured lives attest that sometimes the greatest courage is simply the courage to be yourself.

Thus Blake begins probably his most famous poem, “The Tyger,” still read and memorized centuries after the contemporaries who scorned him have been forgotten. He confronts us with an image of fear. I don’t know much about tigers, but I do know they’re about nine feet long and full of teeth, and I’d rather not meet one “burning bright/In the forests of the night” if I can help it!

Of course, most of us will probably never come face to face with a tiger, but that’s not what Blake’s writing about anyway. He wasn’t interested in nature, only in human nature. What are our tigers? What scares us? Much of what frightens us is no mystery. Open any newspaper: terrorist attacks, impending battles, threats to our constitutional freedoms. It’s truly a sign of the times when a man kills a bus driver causing the bus to crash or a package bomb goes off, both of which happened this week, and we are comforted by being told they are isolated incidents and are only minor compared with the horrors we have seen. These are scary days.

In what distant deeps or skies 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes! 

On what wings dare he aspire? 

What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

Maybe your tiger is different. Maybe you are afraid of other things as well: losing a job, filing for bankruptcy, getting a divorce, facing a medical problem. The list goes on and on. Our fears are always with us.

And what shoulder, & what art, 

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 

And when thy heart began to beat, 

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

Someone once tried to reassure me by saying that five out of six things that people worry about never happen. I don’t know where the person got their statistics. The only place I can think of that five out of six things you worry about don’t come true is in a round of Russian roulette. In any case, such a statement isn’t particularly comforting, depending what that sixth thing is.

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain? 

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

Blake is addressing the tiger, but every stanza ends with a question about who made the tiger in the first place. “What immortal hand or eye,” “what wings,” “what shoulder,” “what dread feet,” does this being have who is capable of making the fearful tiger and setting it loose upon the world? Is it God, the devil, someone or something else?

A few words about Blake’s religion. As I mentioned a moment ago, Blake was raised in Swedenborgianism, a mystical sect of Christianity. As I also mentioned, Blake was a man of contradictions. He broke with the Swedenborgian church, in fact, he looked on organized religion with disdain. He saw the church as an organ of a class-based society that kept people poor, ignorant, and bound for the benefit of a privileged few. At the same time, he considered himself a Christian. He saw Jesus as a liberator of the human spirit and a friend of revolutionaries. He believed that Jesus was able to tap into the divinity that lies dormant in each of us, that "... Jesus transcended nature, among other things through his miracles (if the subject believed), and so can we all. In fact, Blake believed we all do so in the imaginative act of perception, which creates nature in as real a sense as that ascribed to the God of Genesis."3

When the stars threw down their spears 

And watered heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see? 

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

It’s been written that Blake didn’t believe in God. In a sense, I’m sure that’s true. He hardly would have believed in the Church of England’s God, enthroned upon a great hierarchy of being with a ready justification for empire, caste, and slavery. He hardly would have believed in a God that the church taught descended in Jesus, with no chance of our own Incarnation through imagination and vision. Instead of this God, Blake wrote eloquently of a “Universal Man,” of a “Poetic Genius” that existed in each of us and all of us. The religions of the world were only different manifestations of this universal reality, Blake said.

Blake was so far from traditional Christianity that he grew dissatisfied with the Bible and spend much of the latter part of his life writing, in effect, his own scriptures, in the form of his so-called “prophetic books.” It was "... Blake's conviction that he must be to his own nation what prophets like Ezekiel were to theirs."4 The lines from “The Tyger,” “When the stars threw down their spears/And watered heaven with their tears” sounds like it could have come from the Bible, but it didn’t. It came out of Blake’s own mythology and “probably refers to a primordial time just before the creation of the world and [hu]man[ity].”5

If Blake were working from the Bible and writing in a traditional Christian context, we would have a much easier time of interpreting the poem. Orthodox theology tells us that only God can create and of course has created both tigers and lambs for God’s own righteous purposes. But Blake is full of ambiguity, perhaps even anguish. Do we hear a hint of sadism being imputed to the tiger’s creator in the next lines: “Did he smile his work to see?/Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

At the mention of a Lamb, we are likely to think back to the first reading Ruth did for us, Blake’s poem, “The Lamb.” “The Lamb” is from Blake’s book Songs of Innocence, “The Tyger” from the sequel, Songs of Experience. Many of the poems in the two volumes were written to be read in contrast to each other, and these two could hardly be more different. We have gone from a “meek” and “mild” lamb, described as soft, wooly and tender to a fearful tiger, described in terms of fire, metal, and force. And yet, there is a major similarity. Both poems concern who made these symbolic animals. In both, the poet asks the animal who made it. In “The Lamb,” the poet answers his own question:

He is called by thy name.

For He calls Himself a Lamb.

He is meek and He is mild:

He became a little child.

Well-known Christian imagery, referring to the person of Jesus, whom Blake so admired. And Blake ends the poem, “Little Lamb, God bless thee.”

In “The Tyger,” however, the question is never answered. Who created this fierce creature? Blake simply ends the poem with virtually the same words as he began it:

Tyger, Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

This time, there is no comforting blessing, no mention of the Deity. We are left in stunned silence.

The complete title of Blake’s two-volume set is Song of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Between “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” we certainly have two contrary states: one of comfort, the other of fear; one of certainty, the other of confusion; one of God’s presence, the other of God’s ambiguity or even absence.

In wondering who created the tiger, we have mentioned both God and the devil, but a more subtle interpretation is possible. The word “frame” occurs in both the first and last stanzas: “What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” Blake, you will recall, was both the author and illustrator of his poems. His pattern was to contain the verses in a frame of art. Could Blake have been hinting that the mysterious creator of the tiger is himself? After all, he himself was the one who wrote the 24 lines of poetry about a tiger and framed them with a picture of that tiger and its “forests of the night.” Is the “immortal hand or eye” those of the “Poetic Genius,” Blake’s phrase for the power of the imagination available to us all? Is it by means of that “immortal hand or eye” that each of us creates our own tigers as we read the poem, emblematic of the states of our own souls?

If so, then we have a new vantage point on all the tigers that we fear. Blake had fears of his own and he faced them with what worked for him—his art. Poverty, loneliness, persecution for his beliefs he transformed into gemstones of poetry that have outlived the centuries. None of us is William Blake. Perhaps none of us will create art that will live beyond us—or perhaps we will. The important thing, though, is not the product, but the process. It’s making meaning out of the stuff of life that makes the difference. Maybe that’s through art, through conversation, through prayer, through journaling, through philosophy, or some other way. It is by time and will and trial and error that we make sense of our experience, be it delightful of fearful. It is each of us who must do it; it cannot be done by proxy. It is by slow effort that we combine in ourselves the innocence of the lamb and the experience of the tiger.

To illustrate this point in terms of our experience of fear, back in the Fifties, psychologist Irving Janis did a study on patients facing major surgery. In the study,

He found three patterns of emotional response. There were those patients who worried excessively in advance of their surgery. They openly admitted their extreme feelings of vulnerability, attempted to postpone the operation, were unable to sleep without sedation, and constantly sought reassurances from the hospital staff. After the operation these subjects were much more likely than the others to be anxiety ridden.

Another group of patients experienced a moderate kind of fear in anticipation of their surgery. They were, as Janis noted, sometimes worried and tense about certain aspects of the operation such as the nature and mode of the anesthetic. They did, however, ask for and receive realistic information about what was going to happen to them. Although they felt somewhat vulnerable, their concerns were focused on realistic rather than imaginary threats. These people were much less likely than the others to display any emotional disturbance after the operation. They evinced high morale, cooperated well with the hospital staff, and were not so disturbed with the many nursing procedures that they had to undergo.

A third group of patients had very little fear in anticipation of their surgery. They were always cheerful and optimistic about what would happen. They denied any experience of feeling worried and they slept well and seemed to operate in a fairly normal way. Janis suggests that they “appeared to have unrealistic expectations of almost complete invulnerability.” After the operation their vulnerability dawned on them and they were much more likely than the other patients to display anger and resentment towards the staff. They complained and were uncooperative.

Janis concludes that a moderate amount of fear in anticipation of the realistic dimensions of some forthcoming event is helpful because it prepares people to deal with actual dangers and the experience of deprivation they will undergo.6

Those patients who sought to be informed about their situation and thoughtfully integrated that information with their emotions did best.

Poetically, those patients in the study who showed a moderate and realistic amount of fear could be said to have balanced the lamb and the tiger within themselves, which aided their healing.

Try as we might, though, there are those who will have trouble striking that balance, for whom the experience of fear and anxiety may become paralyzing. If you find yourself in this condition, I urge you to seek a professional who can help. If you come to me, I will assist you in finding a counselor.

This finding a balance between the lamb and the tiger, between innocence and experience, is another way of talking about cultivating a basic faith in life. When we have faith in life, we resist hiding from the world in willful ignorance of the complexities and struggles around us. We also nurture our gentleness and childlikeness in the midst of trouble and adversity, never allowing ourselves to become jaded and unfeeling or give in to despair. This balance is difficult at times, but not impossible. Through it, we are fully human and fully alive. After all, if we spent all our lives with the lambs of innocence, we could never grow, never discover who we are. Experience comes as a tiger sometimes, but we can let it be our friend and teacher. By making meaning in our lives, by cultivating a faith in life, we are open to each new experience as it happens. We savor it, and when it comes time to let it go, we let it go—with a blessing.

These, after all, are songs of innocence and experience we are given to sing. In 1827, William Blake died—singing. May we live the same way.

Amen.



1 Alfred Kazin. The Portable Blake (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), 3.



2 Louis Untermeyer. A Concise Treasury of Great Poems, English and American (New York: Permabooks, 1953), 186.



3 Brian Wilke and James Hurt. Literature of the Western World, Vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 461.



4 Ibid., 459-60.



5 Ibid., 482.



6 Eugene Kennedy and Sara C. Charles, M.D. On Becoming a Counselor (New Expanded Edition): A Basic Guide for Nonprofessional Counselors (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 191-92.



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