“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
-William Blake
Who Are The Tigers of Wrath…?
Wild, untamed energy and rage ends up creating more impact than the rigid structures of reason, conformity, training.
William Blake’s famous proverb from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell states complex stuff about us and humanity’s obsession with “instruction” being held up on a pedestal over fiery energy.
Holding these lyrics up in comparison to Blake’s 1794 poem “The Tyger”, one is bound to see what kind of “tigers of wrath” Balke is imagining while writing this.
“Burning bright”, this tiger has a “symmetry” and a fire in its eyes that lights up the “forests of the night”. The tiger’s wrath makes Blake question who could it be who could dare to create the design of this tiger, “twist the sinews” of its heart, create its body and its heart.
It’s a usual response upon reading the poem to see the tiger as someone who’s being created. Manufactured. Synthesized. By the use of hammer and furnace and anvil. Like God is not an all-knowing being but an artisan.
Whoever said the tiger was created by God anyway? Blake asks a question, and expects her to find an answer somehow.
One is almost wary of the tiger in the poem.
And this is the very tiger which sometimes proves to be wiser than the rigid structures of instruction and conformity.
By “horses of instruction”, Blake probably meant the Houyhnhnms from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The Yahoos weren’t tigers, but they did seem to possess a kind of rage, fierceness, as Gulliver very well submitted in his accounts.
What did Blake mean? So much animal imagery in his works that one is supposed to solve it like a puzzle.
Is he glorifying the tiger?
Is he putting the tiger in a box?
What would we realize if we focused on the socio-economic-political context of the time Blake was writing in?
Are tigers of wrath really creatures to be put on a pedestal over a pretense of rigidity and structure?
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