Two DisSimilar Poems

William Blake’s poem “Tyger” is written in trochaic tetrameter and Robert Frost’s “Design” is written as a Italian sonnet. They are two poems that are very dissimilar in form and tone, but somehow the two very different poems overlap in its message and theme. Blake’s poem is about a creature larger than the speaker himself, the Tiger. Frost’s poem is about two tiny insects. They both look at fearful aspects of nature as windows to understanding the God who created nature.

In “Tyger,” the speaker is very alarmed at the great creature of the tiger. He expresses this in his portrayal of the tiger’s orange coat as “burning bright.” His tone is of great alarm, as seen by the repetitious exlaim, “Tyger! Tyger!” Similarly, the use of question after question, increasingly fragmented and concentrated, gives reader the sense of urgency and weightiness of the speaker’s questions. The main point of his description of the tiger leads to questioning who could have “framed,” or, created, this fearful animal. The speaker shudders at the majesty and awfulness of this terrible tiger, but all the more, images that the God who created such a creature must be unspeakably fearsome.

Frost’s “Design” discusses this very notion of Creator and creation, and speculates the same idea of a fearful God. The tone is very different from Blake in approaching this topic. The speaker seems distanced and cool like the observations of a scientist. He starts with the personal pronoun “I,” which never enters Blake’s poem. Then he gives very simple and straight-forward descriptions of his object of interest: “dimpled spider, fat and white, on a white heal-all, holding up a moth.” His words lack the simile and poetic descriptions that Blake had in describing the tiger as a fire in the forest. Interestingly, however, the speaker of “Design” is approaching the very same question from a totally different position. He observes nearly objectively the behavior of nature and wonders the same question—what kind of God designed the darkness and malevolence found in the everyday mundane goings-on of nature?

Another point of parallel is that the size of the fearful creature impacts the speaker’s view of God in these two poems. Blake focuses on the grandness and power of the tiger as the aspect that leads him to fear God. He imagines the tiger itself is inherently formidable, saying that the tiger’s heart was twisted in a furnace. Similarly, Frost’s poem says that the size of the evil also says something about the character of its creator—but in this poem, it is the smallness of the thing that causes the speaker awe and fear. If design governs “a thing so small” as the spider, the speaker imagines that God must be very deeply ic and cruel.

Although these two poems are extremely different in tone and form, they explore the very same question of seeing God’s characteristics through the creations he has made. Both speakers focus on an aspect of nature that terrifies them, and although they are very different things, both see a darkness in these created things that leads them to the same conclusion about the Creator.