William Blake’s The Tyger — illustrated, etched and printed by the poet himself

In 1790, there was a menagerie on the banks of the River Thames that housed a tiger. On a still night, it was said that the animal’s roar could be heard across the water in Lambeth, south London, where William Blake lived.

Was this the creature that fired the radical visionary’s unique genius to compose the lines: ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/ In the forests of the night;/ What immortal hand or eye,/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’

Written in 1793, Blake’s poem The Tyger is a haunting elegy that imagines God as a blacksmith, forging the beast of wrath out of the furnace. Composed during a time of revolution and war, it is one of 17 illuminated poems in Songs of Experience, the darker, more troubling companion to Blake’s earlier volume, Songs of Innocence.

Aside from Jerusalem (‘And did those feet in ancient time’) — England’s unofficial national anthem — The Tyger is almost certainly Blake’s most famous and best-loved poem. It is an epic imagining of satanic forces. The blood of life is transfused into the molten metal of industrial production. Blake evokes the sweat, smoke and glow of the smelting process, although he leaves it up to the reader to decide whether the toil is noble or the industry foul.

Some have suggested the tiger is a metaphor for the French Revolution, which had begun four years earlier, while others argue that the animal represents the British government and the repressive laws enacted against dissenters such as Blake to avert the threat of revolution at home.

At the time of the poem’s publication, few people had ever read any of Blake’s work. The spiritually subversive Londoner, who claimed to see angels in Peckham Rye and the face of God in Broad Street, was too far out there for the good people of Albion. Had it not been for his supporters, fellow Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the intellectuals revolving around William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Blake might not have been read at all.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience was Blake’s most successful publication: about 45 copies are known, printed between 1789 and 1827. Each poem was etched, inked and printed by the poet, and then coloured by hand with the help of his wife, Catherine. Blake, who had been apprenticed to an engraver at the age of 14, devised his own method, which he called ‘illuminated printing’. Traditionally, books would be printed in a letterpress workshop, and the illustrations produced separately. Blake brought this highly managed process together by etching the drawings and poems directly onto copper plates in reverse script.

‘He treats words like images; he sees them as equally important,’ says Murray Macaulay, head of Prints and Multiples at Christie’s in London. ‘He is looking back to the Gothic style of the Middle Ages and medieval illuminated manuscripts.’

Blake had good reasons for this laborious process, other than his love of those ‘virtuous ancients’: in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the publication of books and pamphlets was tightly controlled by William Pitt’s government. By bringing this process together, the radical poet could evade the censors’ eyes.

The poet printed only four copies of Songs of Experience before combining the poems with those from Songs of Innocence after 1794 to create Songs of Innocence and of Experience. ‘They take their cue from chapbooks, which were an early kind of illustrated children’s literature,’ says Macaulay. ‘Songs of Innocence is very much about children and enchantment, whereas the poems in Experience are darker and about disenchantment.’

On 3 December 2025, eight poems from the very first issue of Songs of Experience will be offered in the Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture at Christie’s in London. In addition to The Tyger are poems such as Nurses Song, My Pretty Rose Tree, The Clod & the Pebble and The Chimney Sweeper.

Measuring around 10 centimetres high, these illuminated pages are from the collection of the surgeon and notable Blake scholar Sir Geoffrey Keynes. ‘With the other three early copies of Experience intact, and two in public collections, it makes these individual pages so exceptionally rare. They are as close as you can get to the essence of Blake as an artist and a poet,’ says Macaulay.

This impression of The Tyger, along with My Pretty Rose Tree, was also once owned by Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows.

Blake never received the recognition he deserved in his lifetime. However, in his later years he was taken up by a group of young acolytes, including the painter and printmaker Samuel Palmer, who saw in his defiant and fiercely irradiated antinomian visions, a man who faced up to the truth of things.

As Keynes noted in 1953: ‘There were realities in London all around him which belied the optimism of the Songs of Innocence; poverty, prejudice, deceit and despair were everywhere. The Songs of Experience are Blake’s bitter picture of life as the innocent child must find it as he emerges from the happy, confident days of childhood.’

Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture is on view from 27 November to 2 December 2025 at Christie’s in London

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