Blake's "Tyger" As Miltonic Beast (William Blake and John Milton) (Critical Essay‪)‬

WILLIAM BLAKE'S "TYGER" IN SONGS OF EXPERIENCE, 1794, ROAMS throughout the poet s later symbolical books, and despite the intense scrutiny that scholars have dedicated to Blake's famous beast, it has not been recognized that imagery referencing the genesis, evolution, and redemption of this fiery creature was influenced crucially by the works of John Milton. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to argue the complexities of these dynamics (for they indeed are complex). (1) Blake was inspired by Milton as no other author, and in An bland of the Moon, 1784-85, Quid (as Blake) enigmatically describes his lustful physiognomy as "Very like a Goat's face," while the face of the female who inordinately admires Quid's "high finishd" Art possesses the characteristics of "that noble beast the Tyger" (E 465), an allusion to Milton's Comus (68-74), where the brutish "human count'nance" is "chang'd / Into ... Tiger ... or bearded Goat." Comus (71) and Paradise Lost (4-344, 7.466-67) both associate the Tiger with the Ounce (the latter a member of the Lynx family), and Blake, in a version of the Magic Banquet, after Comus, illustrated a sorrow-faced Ounce and/or Tiger (Butlin, pl. 628). (2)