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Tense and the Sense of Blake's “The Tyger”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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- Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
References
1 page 596 In Discussions of William Blake, ed. John E. Grant (Boston, 1961), p. 67.
2 page 596 It must be said, however, that the evidence of the drafts for the fifth stanza complicates the matter considerably. Mr. Erdman (whose complete textual notes are now available in David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, with a Commentary by Harold Bloom, Garden City, N. Y., 1965, p. 717) has detected an untranscribed variant in line 26, which should read as follows: “And [(is del.) did he laugh del.] dare be [smile del.] [laugh del.] his work to see.” This discovery that Blake initially started with a present tense, is, before changing to an indubitable preterite, did, then changing again to the problematic dare, and finally changing back to the preterite did will be discussed further in the main text of this article. But the fact that did was finally substituted for dare does not necessarily mean that Blake thought of the two words as being in the same tense, as Robinson, “Verb Tense in Blake's ‘The Tyger’,” PMLA, lxxix (1964), 669, infers. On the contrary, it is quite possible that Blake felt a difference in tense to be one reason the exact word was so difficult to decide. And Robinson's contention, p. 669, that the substitution of could for dare indicates that dare must be a preterite is certainly unsound. The verb could is by no means an indubitable preterite and often has both present and future senses.
3 page 596 “Verb Tense,” pp. 667, 668-669, n. 15.
4 page 596 P. 667, n. 13. How slippery these questions may become is indicated by a sentence in a letter written in 1811 from Bell to Southey, “I wish I dare put tbem down among our books.” Robinson asserts that this usage is a preterite subjunctive without indicating that the OED identifies it simply as a “past.” It is also suggestive that two of the four other examples given by the OED of dare as a “past” were also written by Kingsley, who looms so large among Robinson's examples of the dare preterite, though for some reason Robinson chose not to include them in his list. This evidence does seem rich enough to establish the dare preterite as an idiosyncratic unit in Kingsley's personal style, whatever it may have been for earlier writers.
5 page 597 P. 669. Robinson insists several times on the “temporal remoteness” of the creation.
6 page 597 The Complete Writings of William Blake With All the Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1957), p. 550; hereafter cited as K.
7 page 597 “Verb Tense,” p. 669.
8 page 597 Hazard Adams, “Reading Blake's Lyrics: ‘The Tyger’,” in Discussions of William Blake, p. 57. The fact that Robinson's page references from this volume are usually incorrect suggests that he may not have studied the literature about the poem with sufficient care.
9 page 597 See Jerusalem, pl. 59. Here is a sample of how the evidence contained in the Concordance, for which I am again indebted to Mr. Erdman, complicates the picture without actually contradicting the fine of argument I am following. In the prophecies women are at work twisting cords of nets that are compared to the brain (though not to the heart—except when twists is used as a noun in Thel vi.4, K 130), e.g., The First Book of Urizen xxv.20–21, K 235. Another crucial passage, but one of exceptional complexity, occurs in The Four Zoas ii.157. More relevant to “The Tyger” is The Four Zoas viii. 92, K 343, where “Horrible hooks & nets [Urizen] form'd, twisting the cords of iron …” as he constructs a monstrous hermaphrodite antithetical to Los. Most of the passages containing some form of twist similarly have to do with a malign creation designed to counteract the productions of Imagination. While twist is often connected with the manipulation of threads or fibres (e.g., Jerusalem lxvii.28, K 704) there is also a reference to the “twisted mail” of a suit of armor (King Edward the Third i.3, K 17). If one broadens the inquiry from questions of diction to questions of symbolic action, however, he finds such a line as this: “She [Tirzah] ties the knot of bloody veins into the red hot heart” (Milton xix.56, K 501). Here the sinister impersonation of the Female Will is seen at work on the heart of a monster. But this passage presents a prophetic vision of creation (more exactly, of sabotage of creation) such as cannot be achieved by the benighted questioner who speaks Blake's lyric “The Tyger”— at least as long as he remains in his present state.
10 page 598 As I shall point out again, the Tyger is imagined as being practically equivalent to the climactic eschatological beasts of the Book of Job: Behemoth and Leviathan. The obdurate bodily members of these beasts are particularly described in Job xl.17-18 and xli.24.
11 page 598 “Verb Tense,” p. 666.
12 page 598 See Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (New York, 1963), pp. 137-139. Paul Miner, “‘The Tyger’: Genesis & Evolution in the Poetry of William Blake,” Criticism, iv (1962), 59-73. Hazard Adams' position is now most adequately represented by a chapter in his book William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle, Wash., 1963), pp. 52-74. Earlier criticism is conveniently listed in his “Bibliographical Appendix,” pp. 329-332.
13 page 598 Discussions of William Blake, p. 74, n. 30.
14 page 598 Ibid., p. 75.
15 page 599 “Verb Tense,” p. 669.
1 page 600 Jerome Beaty and William H. Matchett, Poetry: From Statement to Meaning (New York, 1965), p. 244.
2 page 600 In Discussions of William Blake, ed. John E. Grant (Boston, 1961), p. 70.
3 page 601 S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Providence, R. I., 1965), p. 414.
4 page 601 Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake, Painter and Poet: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse (Chicago, 1964), p. 86. See also Geoffrey Keynes, A Study of the Illuminated Books of William Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet (New York and Paris, 1964), pp. 18-19.
5 page 601 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (New Haven and London, 1964), p. 252.
6 page 601 Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Garden City, N. Y., 1964), pp. 399-400. Philip Hobsbaum, “A Rhetorical Question Answered: Blake's Tyger and Its Critics,” Neophilologus, xlviii (1964), 151-155. Vivian de Sola Pinto, ed., “Introduction” to William Blake [A Selection] (New York, 1965), pp. 19-20. Alicia Ostriker, Vision and Verse in William Blake (Madison and Milwaukee, Wis., 1965), esp. pp. 59, 76-77, 86-88.
1 page 602 It may seem ungenerous of me to quote so copiously Professor Grant's gracious concessions to my own arguments, but my intention is to preserve the exact phrasing of these comments as they stood at the time I was answering his criticisms. After receiving my reply to his first criticism, Professor Grant revised that criticism, introducing, among other things, thirteen verbal alterations. While his changes cannot have been substantial (according to the PMLA rules for controversial exchanges), it is a fact that the version printed above is not precisely the same one to which I responded in my “Reply” (also printed above). What modifications of tone or emphasis his verbal changes may have introduced, I cannot say. I no longer have access to his statement in its original form.
2 page 602 I had considered at one point that his question might have arisen from some misunderstanding as to the meaning of preterite, but this cannot be the case, for he uses the terms preterite and past interchangeably, as do I. See the sentences quoted in my first paragraph here.
3 page 602 Possibly Professor Grant intends that my quotation from Crabbe constitutes evidence for his preference for the subjunctive mood, for Crabbe, a contemporary of Blake, is among the handful of instances of a preterite subjunctive dare which I cited. But my list of examples, which was drawn up only to illustrate the past tense function of dare before, during, and after Blake's era, cannot be thus used as if it were an exhaustive list (in which case each quotation could be taken as representative of all usage in the time for which it was reported). It is, then, very important to observe that in my original paper I introduced my list as a “selection of examples” (p. 667). Professor Grant failed to observe this, as is shown by his perplexity (in footnote five of his original criticism) over the fact that I did not include the OED‘s quotations from Kingsley in my list of preterite dare‘s. Had he understood the nature of my list, as I explained it in my PMLA note, he would not have been puzzled about this point.
4 page 603 In his discussion of the statistics on dare occurrences in Blake (paragraph two of his latest communication), Professor Grant says, “If, as [Robinson] asserts to be the case in Tennyson, there were asingle clear-cut case [of darepreterite]…” etc. In this instance I was not merely “asserting” that Tennyson used a dare preterite; I was referring to the explicit occurrence of dare preterite in Tennyson's “Dora” which I cited in my original PMLA paper, p. 667. As for Professor Grant's charge that I have “misused the evidence to imply …” etc., I would point out that he Mmself accepted the argument which I support with this evidence. And in any case, the statements of both of us are available for scrutiny above, and any misuse of evidence can easily be detected by our readers. Concerning his latest clarification of his views on Blake's allegedly careless usage, I would point out that the word careless in the OED does not mean “substandard,” a datum which Professor Grant can verify by looking up the word careless in the OED. Finally, I said nothing whatever about English universities teaching or not teaching elementary grammar. Professor Grant has misread my sentence beginning “Unerring recognition of the tense …”; the meaning of the sentence is that recognition of tense differences is not something a native speaker learns through formal instruction in grammar. (Rather he learns it as he learns all the other elements of his language's structure—through spontaneous imitation of those whom he hears speaking the language around him when he is a child.)
5 page 603 He does not, of course, accept my solution as adequate, his main objection being that my interpretation fails to account for “the kind of energetic heave of the (masculine) shoulder” which he feels is implied somewhere in the poem. But the poem says nothing about an “energetic heave”; the poem says simply “And what shoulder, and what art, / Could twist the sinews of thy heart?”