That is why Blake begins on the four great beats of “Tyger! Tyger!”, which call the creation by a name and bring us in apprehension before it.

The poem is hammered together with alliterative strokes. Frame is there,

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

because he wants fearful as well.

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

begins the questioning. Blake goes straight to the poles: we are in the presence of a creation that can be traced from distant deeps to skies. What sustains the verse in our ear is the long single tone in which are blended the related sounds of burnt, fire, thine, eyes. By natural association—from the burning fire to the topmost eyes of the Tyger—and through the swell of the line, these words also form a natural little scale of four notes—a scale that ends in the crash of the question-mark. Blake’s. mind is darting between the mysterious unseen he, the maker of the Tyger, and the fire in its eyes. The fire is central to his thought, so much so that it eclipses the maker as a person and turns him into the force and daring with which he creates. Blake does not write “He”; he is far more interested in the creation than in the creator. But so great is this creation that the creator grows mysterious and powerful in its light. What is so beautiful in the second stanza is the leap from the Tyger to the creator. Blake goes from the fire to the creator’s wings. This is not because he has an image of a celestial being with great wings, but because the fire could be created only by someone lifted on topmost wings. Blake is as astounded by the creator as he is by the Tyger—and in the same way, for both are such revelations of absolute energy. The emphasis on the creator, in the last line of the second stanza, is thus on dare.

We are now in the midst of the creation—or rather, of the great thing being created. The hammering, twisting, laughing strokes with which the creator works are not more decisive than Blake’s own verse hammer. As usual, he has leaped ahead of us, and begins on a new question; a question that begins with And because it is like a man taking breath between hammer strokes:

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

The creator’s shoulder, with terrible force, twists the sinews to make the Tyger’s heart. Twists is powerful enough; but there is joined to it in Blake’s mind what is “crooked” and off the main path for the genius-creator. The shoulder twisting the heart together has turned the creator’s back away from us, even as we imagine him at his work. The hammer strokes now go faster and faster; the creation is so swift and final with each blow that Blake’s mind rushes after the fall of the hammer, the movements of the creating hands and feet, the beats of the new heart. The poem now moves to the rhythm of the great work. Yet the poet must know whose dread hands and feet, working together before the anvil, could create this. Where does the creator’s body and tools end and the Tyger begin?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

The chains ring in the sorcerer’s workshop. The questions now dart from the heart to the brain with the same instantaneous force with which brain and heart are being made. But where is this being done? Where is the furnace in which the fire of consciousness is being poured out into the Tyger’s brain? What, in space and time, could even hold the Tyger as it is being created? Blake never answers, for the wonder with which he asks them is the wonder with which he beholds the Tyger. But he leaps ahead, in the last phrase of the third line and the whole fourth line after it, to create the image of so dread a, power that it can grasp the terrors of the Tyger. It is the long courageous movement with which the clasp is made—a great hand moving into the furnace to bring the Tyger to us—that gives the creation its final awesomeness. Blake creates this by the length of his question. Between the dread grasp and the clasp that holds the terrors in its hand is the movement between the creation and our being witness to it. Technically the thing is done by leaving a distance, a moment’s suspense, between the end of the third line on grasp and the hard closing of the stanza on clasp. The assonance of those two words, like bones rasping together, joins us to the thing.