Interpreting and comparing poems

Blake's 'The Lamb' is built on a single question — 'who made thee?' — and its quiet achievement is to answer that question so completely that the answer becomes a blessing. The poem does not merely describe a lamb; it performs an act of reassurance, turning a child's question about creation into a gentle catechism in which the answer is never for a moment in doubt. The reading I want to defend is that the poem makes creation feel safe, and that it does so by its form as much as its content.

The most obvious method is the question-and-answer STRUCTURE across the two stanzas. The first stanza asks — 'Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee' — and the repetition of the question makes it tender rather than anxious, like an adult drawing out a child. The second stanza answers — 'Little Lamb I'll tell thee' — and the answer arrives with serene confidence. There is no uncertainty here: the question is asked only so that it can be answered. This call-and-response shape is itself the meaning. Creation is presented as something knowable, and the knowing is a comfort.

The poem's DICTION is soft and childlike throughout. The creator's gifts are described in plain, gentle terms — 'clothing of delight', 'Softest clothing wooly bright', 'such a tender voice' — and the adjectives ('softest', 'tender', 'meek', 'mild') cluster around gentleness. There are no hard sounds and no difficult words; the language is pitched at a child, and that pitch tells us how creation is being understood: as something loving and mild.

The ANSWER itself rests on an identification. 'He is called by thy name, / For he calls himself a Lamb' folds together the creature, the child and the creator — 'I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name'. The lamb, the speaking child and Christ (the Lamb of God) become one family. This is the poem's central move: it removes all distance between maker and made. The God who made the lamb is meek and mild like the lamb, and 'became a little child' — so the creature has nothing to fear from its creator, because the creator is one of its own.

The final REFRAIN seals the reassurance: 'Little Lamb God bless thee. / Little Lamb God bless thee.' The repeated blessing closes the poem on benediction rather than argument. What the poem finally achieves is to make creation feel like a blessing rather than a mystery — and it does so by answering its own question with such gentleness that no doubt survives. Reading it, I feel the calm the poem describes: the certainty of the answer is what makes the comfort land.

Both of these Rossetti poems are spoken by a speaker imagining their own death and addressing a loved one who will outlive them, and both make the survivor's MEMORY their subject. Yet the two poems value that memory in opposite ways, and comparing them reveals a poet testing the same situation from two poles: memory as a duty owed to the dead, and memory as a gift the dead release.

Both poems open by addressing the beloved directly, but the TONE of the address differs at once. 'Remember' opens with a command: 'Remember me when I am gone away'. The imperative 'Remember me' makes memory a duty, something the survivor is asked — even instructed — to perform. By contrast, 'Song' opens by waving away the usual rituals of mourning: 'Sing no sad songs for me; / Plant thou no roses at my head'. Where 'Remember' demands a response, 'Song' refuses one. The difference in opening mood — one asking to be held onto, the other letting go of the very rites of grief — sets the two poems against each other from the first line.

The decisive contrast comes in how each poem treats FORGETTING. 'Remember' (in its opening lines) clings to presence — 'When you can no more hold me by the hand' — mourning the loss of touch and asking to be kept in mind. 'Song', however, places remembering and forgetting on exactly equal footing: 'And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget.' The balanced 'if thou wilt' clauses are the heart of the poem's method. By repeating the same phrase before two opposite verbs, Rossetti makes the choice genuinely free — the survivor may remember OR forget, and neither is wrong. Where 'Remember' would feel a forgetting as a loss, 'Song' offers it as a release.

Set together, the two poems reveal something neither shows alone: that Rossetti is working through a single problem — what the dead may ask of the living — from opposite directions. 'Remember' treats memory as an obligation the dead are owed; 'Song' treats it as a freedom the dead can grant. The comparison shows a poet thinking, not merely repeating a theme. Reading the pair, I find 'Song' the more generous of the two precisely because 'Remember' has shown me how natural the opposite impulse — the wish to be held in mind — really is.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 is a poem about ageing that does something unexpected with its subject: instead of lamenting the approach of death, it converts that approach into an ARGUMENT for love. The reading I want to defend is that the poem uses the speaker's own decline not to pity himself but to intensify the beloved's devotion — and that it achieves this through a sequence of three dying images and a couplet that turns the whole poem outward. A reader might insist the poem is simply melancholy; but the structure works towards consolation, not grief.

The poem is built on three successive METAPHORS for the speaker's age, and the method is one of accelerating closeness to death. First, the speaker is autumn — 'That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang'. The hesitation of 'or none, or few' enacts a mind watching its own losses, counting what little remains. The image of 'Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang' turns the body into a wrecked church, beautiful and abandoned at once. Then the speaker is twilight — 'the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west' — a shorter span than a season, narrowing the time left. Finally he is a dying fire, 'the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie'. Each metaphor is briefer in span than the last — year, then day, then the moment a fire goes out — so the STRUCTURE itself accelerates towards extinction. The form measures out the speaker's diminishing time.

The fire image carries the poem's most concentrated paradox: the fire lies on 'the ashes of his youth' and is 'Consumed with that which it was nourished by'. The very thing that fed the fire — its own fuel, its own youth — is what now smothers it. Applied to a human life, this is a quiet devastation: we are destroyed by the living we have already done. The diction of consumption ('ashes', 'expire', 'death-bed') gathers the poem's grief into a single, unflinching image of self-extinguishing.

Yet the COUPLET refuses to end in grief. 'This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.' The turn is decisive: the whole catalogue of decline has been building, not to self-pity, but to a claim about the beloved's love. Because the beloved can SEE the speaker fading, that love grows 'more strong'. The poem's argument is that mortality is the reason for, not the enemy of, love. What this poem finally achieves is the conversion of decline into devotion: the dying images are not a complaint but a case, and the couplet delivers the verdict. Reading it, I find the consolation persuasive precisely because the poem has been so honest about the dying first — the love is earned by the bareness that precedes it.

Both of these sonnets confront the passing of time and the threat it poses to what we love, and both use the English sonnet's closing couplet to deliver their final position. Yet the two poems answer time in opposite ways: Sonnet 18 DEFEATS time by promising permanence, while Sonnet 73 SUBMITS to time and finds value in the submission. Comparing them by method — how each uses image and couplet — reveals two contrasting strategies for facing mortality, and a poet exploring the same enemy from confidence and from resignation.

The first point of comparison is the central IMAGE each poem chooses for time. Sonnet 18 begins by reaching for summer — 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' — only to find summer inadequate, since the beloved is 'more lovely and more temperate' than a season that fades. The image is raised in order to be transcended. By contrast, Sonnet 73 begins in autumn and decline — 'When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang' — and does not transcend it; the speaker IS the dying season, the fading day, the guttering fire. Where Sonnet 18 uses a seasonal image to argue the beloved is BEYOND time, Sonnet 73 uses one to confess the speaker is WITHIN it. The same kind of image — a turning season — is made to do opposite work.

The decisive comparison is the COUPLET, since both poems load their answer into the final two lines. Sonnet 18's couplet is a triumphant claim of permanence: 'So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.' The poem turns inward, on itself — 'this' is the sonnet — and promises that the verse will outlast time and keep the beloved alive. Sonnet 73's couplet, however, turns OUTWARD, to the beloved's feeling: 'This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.' Where Sonnet 18's couplet defeats time by art, Sonnet 73's couplet accepts time and asks only that the nearness of loss deepen love. The same formal device — the couplet as resolution — produces a boast in one poem and a tender concession in the other.

Set together, the two sonnets reveal what neither shows alone: that Shakespeare uses one fixed form — image plus resolving couplet — to stage two entirely opposed answers to mortality. Sonnet 18 says love can outlast time; Sonnet 73 says love is made stronger BY time's threat. Reading them as a pair, I find Sonnet 73 the more moving precisely because Sonnet 18 has shown me the confident alternative: against the boast of permanence, the quiet acceptance of 'leave ere long' feels truer to how love actually meets its end.

Blake's 'The Lamb' and 'The Tyger' ask the same question — who made you? — and the most rewarding way to read them is as a single argument conducted across two poems. Apart, each is a vivid creature-poem; together, they stage a debate about the nature of the creator that neither could mount alone. My reading is that the pair sets a knowable, gentle God against an unknowable, frightening one, and that the real subject is not the lamb or the tiger but the same Creator seen through innocence and through experience. The comparison itself is the meaning.

The first and clearest point of comparison is the QUESTION each poem asks and whether it is answered. 'The Lamb' asks 'Little Lamb who made thee' and answers itself at once — 'Little Lamb I'll tell thee … He is called by thy name' — so the question is a gentle catechism whose answer is never in doubt. By contrast, 'The Tyger' asks 'What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?' and never answers; the poem is a cascade of unanswered questions, and the absence of an answer is precisely its terror. Where 'The Lamb' uses the question to reassure, 'The Tyger' uses it to unsettle. The same grammatical form — the interrogative — does opposite work: it closes in one poem and opens, dreadfully, in the other.

The second point of comparison is the DICTION and SOUND through which each creator is imagined. 'The Lamb' is soft: 'meek', 'mild', 'tender voice', the creator who 'became a little child'. The gentleness of the language makes the creator gentle. 'The Tyger', conversely, is forged: 'What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain?' The vocabulary of the smithy — hammer, chain, furnace, anvil — makes creation a violent, industrial act, and the hammering monosyllables enact the blows. Where the Lamb's creator nurtures, the Tyger's creator FORGES. The contrast in diction carries the whole difference between the two visions of God.

The third point of comparison — and the hinge of the pair — is the single line in which 'The Tyger' explicitly turns towards 'The Lamb': 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' This is the line that makes the two poems one. By naming the lamb inside the tiger's poem, Blake forces the reader to hold both creatures, and both creators, at once — and to confront the unbearable possibility that the meek God of innocence and the fearful God of experience are the SAME God. The question is left hanging because it cannot be answered: a creator who made both the gentle lamb and the burning tiger is beyond the comforting theology of 'The Lamb'.

Read as a pair, then, the poems reveal what neither shows alone: that creation, seen through innocence, is a blessing, and seen through experience, is a terror — and that these are not two creators but one, glimpsed from two states of the soul. The contrast of refrain is what makes this audible: the Lamb's soothing 'God bless thee' against the Tyger's hammering, unanswered questions. I find the pair far more disturbing together than apart. 'The Tyger' read alone is awe and dread; read against 'The Lamb', it becomes a theological crisis, because the certainty the Lamb enjoys is exactly what the Tyger destroys. The comfort of the one poem is the measure of the other's unease — and that is an effect available only when the two are read together.

'The Tyger' is one long, unanswered question, and its achievement is to make creation itself frightening. The reading I want to defend is that the poem stages awe curdling into dread, and that its refusal to answer its own questions is not a failure of nerve but its central method: by asking who could have made such a creature and never deciding, Blake leaves the reader holding wonder and terror together. A gentler reading is possible — that the questions are reverent, an act of praise before a sublime creation — and the poem does begin in something like awe; but its imagery and its one crucial alteration push it, I will argue, towards dread.

The poem's governing METHOD is the question. Almost every line is interrogative — 'What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?' — and the accumulation of unanswered questions creates a mounting unease. A question implies a questioner who does not know the answer, and across six stanzas the speaker never finds one. The 'fearful symmetry' of the opening names the poem's paradox precisely: the tiger is beautiful ('symmetry') and terrifying ('fearful') at once, and the poem cannot separate the two. This is why a purely reverent reading is hard to sustain — reverence settles, and this poem never settles.

The IMAGERY of creation makes the maker violent. The central stanzas imagine the tiger forged in a smithy: 'What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp'. Creation here is not a gentle bestowing of gifts but an act of industrial force — hammer, chain, furnace, anvil — and the hammering monosyllables enact the blows of the forge. The repeated 'dread' ('what dread hand', 'what dread feet', 'what dread grasp') tolls through the poem like a refusal of comfort. The God who could make this creature must be as fearsome as the creature, and the diction will not let the reader forget it.

The poem's decisive moment is the question of the fifth stanza: 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' Here the speaker confronts the possibility that the gentle creator of innocence and the terrible creator of experience are the SAME — and the line is left hanging, unanswered, because to answer 'yes' would shatter the comforting theology the question evokes. This is where the awe finally curdles: the speaker is no longer merely admiring the tiger but flinching at what its existence implies about its maker.

The clearest proof that the poem moves towards dread is its single STRUCTURAL alteration. The opening stanza asks who 'Could frame thy fearful symmetry'; the closing stanza — otherwise an exact repetition — changes one word: 'Dare frame thy fearful symmetry'. 'Could' asks about possibility; 'dare' asks about courage and transgression. The shift from 'could' to 'dare' is the whole poem in miniature: the question has moved from 'who was able to make this?' to 'who would risk making this?' — and that risk is the dread the poem has been building. What this poem finally achieves, then, is to make the act of creation itself a source of fear: it offers no answer because there is no comforting one. I find the poem's power lies exactly in this withholding — the awe of the opening is real, but the imagery and that single altered word convert it, by the end, into a dread the reader cannot put down. The poem refuses to console, and that refusal is its meaning.