Compare the imagery in the following two poems - Essay Example

Teacher Compare the imagery in the following two poems. What are the differing effects? How effective are they? (William Blake, “Tyger” and William Wordsworth, “Daffodills”) William Blake’s poem entitled “The Tyger” is structured as quatrains with each section composing of four stanzas posed as a question asking big questions which was seemed to be directed at the “The Tyger”. It was however an asking of how the Tyger was created and essentially the delved more on the Creator.

Blake was masterful in providing visual imagery of the subject of his poem such as the poem “Tyger”. In this poem, he described the omnipotence of the Creator through the lines “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” In the same manner, he also vividly provided us the fierceness of the tiger as he painted its image as “Burnt the fire of thine eyes? / On what wings dare he aspire?” Blake also used metaphors in the succeeding line using metaphors such as “fire” to further describe the fierceness and power of the “Tyger”.

Then Blake wrote with a certain degree of awe when he ascribed the “Tyger” as a mere creation of a Creator that he asked, “And what shoulder, & what art” have created it? He would like to ask the intelligence who made it because the Tyger is so fierce that it could turn against its maker evident with these lines “What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp / Dare its deadly terrors clasp?” Finally, when his questions were already made about the tiger and its Creator, he wondered if its Creator was pleased to create the tiger with the question “Did he smile his work to see”.

This poem more than its visual narration is more metaphysical in nature as it asked creation, God and His Wisdom. It used metaphors and vivid imagery for his point to be effectively conveyed to its readers. Unlike the “The Tyger” which has heavy metaphysical theme, Blake’s other poem entitled “Daffodils” is really a poem of appreciation for nature. As one would read through the poem, it was as if Blake is tour guiding the reader about the Daffodils when he “WANDERD lonely as a cloud / That floats on high oer vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze”.

In reading these lines, the imagery is so alive that it was as if Blake himself had taken the reader “beside the lake and beneath the trees”. After being under the trees, Blake asked the reader to look up to the skies to see what he saw. It’s the “twinkle on the Milky Way” as it stretched throughout its galaxy and thousands of stars that accompany it. In sum, “Daffodils” is a contemplative poem that appreciates nature and in it found the “bliss of solitude; /And then my heart with pleasure fills,/” which is similar to Thoreau’s “Walden Pond” that also appreciate the wonder of nature and how it made them happy.

It used imagery literally to appreciate what Blake saw while imagery was used as a metaphor in “The Tyger” to ask the big questions about creation and the Creator. I