Religious symbolism
The Lamb by William Blake
1. The Lamb And The Tyger as a Religious Symbol
One of the very important and known features of Blake's poetry is the use of symbols. In all of his poems there is the footprint of symbolism besides surface meaning. Though many believe that Blake's poems are written in a simple language, no one can deny the presence of deep meaning. However in order to catch deep meaning people should have knowledge abou t the use of symbols in Blake's poetry which have been classified into (Ibrahim, 2017, p63) .
Worthy is the Lamb: The Nature of Christ as Lamb and Rightful Worship of the Godhead . Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing." The image of Jesus Christ as a Lamb can be traced throughout the entirety of Scripture and each instance sheds light on the intricacies of His nature. The goal of this study is to analyze how the Lamb motif of Scripture highlights Christ's substitutionary death as the perfect sacrifice. for the atonement of mankind's sins and gives further purpose to the worship of both the Father and Himself due to the redemption that His death brought to men.
The image of the Lamb seen throughout Scripture is perfectly fulfilled in Jesus Christ as the victorious, atoning, salvific, substitutionary, and sacrificial Lamb of God and is effectually seen in the justification of man and the worship of the Godhead . Scripture uses at least 5 major words for the main sacrificial animal found within its pages. While each of these terms is important, two are vital to the contents of this study: αμνός and apviov. These terms are the only two used within Johannine literature and 7 provide a foundational understanding of the sacrificial lamb concept seen throughout Scripture (Harney,2004,p 4).
The presence of God that be in the lamb and the child and possibly is the human being. The child and the lamb in the poem have used the symbol of the thought of mysticism. He is called by thy name supports that the creator of lamb God Himself, who is the lamb. On the other hand, the child and the other things nothing else but Christian thoughts as we find in the line: He is meek and He is mild. The Lamb is a Christian symbol that has been used in the other poem of Blake. The Lamb of God is a symbol of Jesus Christ, meant the speaker is conjecturing if the same God created both the creature under the study. The speaker also spectacles if the creator, again apparently the Christian God, smiled upon appreciating his work of the Tyger accomplished (Dutta,2021,p72) .
In "Songs of Innocence'. Blake describes the security and assurance of existence that belongs to lamb's under a wise shepherd or to children with loving parents. Songs of Innocence records the terrifying and disillusionary experience of adult life when the 'shades of the prisonhouse' had already closed upon the maturing man. But the apparent evil of existence has its bearing upon the formation of a man's character, as Browning also would emphasize a century later.
Even the most forbidding things of life have, perhaps a beauty and justification of their own, that seems to be the message of the poem 'The Tyger', a remarkable lyric which Charles Lamb rightly described as'glorious'. Most of the poems of Songs of Experience are counter points to the earlier poems in Songs of Innocence, the tiger being a counter point to the lamb. The tiger seems to symbolize fierce, spiritual forces which are needed to break the shackles of experience. Blake believes in the all-embracing ure of Godhead. The annarent evil in the tiger is only an expression of divinefound 8 in Christ; his symbol of the divine spirit was the means by which he hoped to unite innocence and experience in some tremendous synthesis. Ordinary minds generally appreciate the lamb but are terror-struck by the tiger element in the universe -nature 'red in tooth and claw' or the tiger and ape in human nature. Unlike the lamb, the tiger is terrifying. But this terror is a manifestation of divine force. Blake seems to think that love cannot be absent from power. God's very power is a guarantee of His love.
The lamb may stand for Jesus and for the redemption which is assured through His lovefind the traditional explanation that the tiger symbolises the wrath of Godunacceptable. According to Roy P.Basler, the tiger may not represent supernatural at all., but something within the soul of man. Blake's poetry testifies abundantly to the fact that he was most appalled by the infinite extremes of the human psyche., - love-hate, trust-fear. This interpretation is, of course, thought provoking but the symbolism inherent in the tiger seems to be, in all probability, that energy is, after all, eternal delight. So the tiger may symbolize for Blake, as it has been rightly suggested, the abundant life' assured by Christ. When the lamb is destroyed by experience, the tiger is needed to restore the world (Mazumdar, 2014,p15,p16).
2. Discuss The Religious Poem of The Tiger
The monstrous image created by William Blake in The Tyger' left the world wrapped in an apocalyptic vision that creates an epiphany of unknown Romantic potentials symbolised in 'The Tyger'. The apocalyptic vision, deeply rooted in Christian religion, develops into an ominous harbinger of the destruction of the modern world portrayed in W.B. Yeats' 'The Second Coming'. The image of the beast marks the difference between two ages, one with strong potentials and the other with fear and resident evil unexplained. I argue that the apocalyptic theory in 9 Christianity has an impact on the development of the image of the beast in both poems, an impact that highlights man's retreat from Nature into the modern world which may fall apart because of beastly practices.We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, ba- sically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric.
Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds can in fact lead to mass destructionearly childhood inevitably constitutes an inseparable part of his thought. It may be argued that Blake's vision of God developed from childhood to adulthood, taking into consideration that his idea of the Church and priest is fundamen- tally radical as he was known to be nonconformist. Moreover, Blake might have taken America as a symbol of a new order heralded in a post-apocalyptic vision, which stands in contrast to what Altizer claimed, that the vision of a new Eden that comes in the aftermath of the eschatological end of the Christian God.
The Tyger' has posthumously influenced many writers, such as John Cotton, who wrote a version of the poem published in Children of Alhion in 1969, and it has been adapted into a number of music performances and films. The opening stanza illustrates the physical presence of the apocalypse.which takes on flesh and blood as a beast roaming with burning eyes, debunk-ing the pseudo quietness assumed by the darkness covering the forest: 10
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,Could
frame thy fearful symmetry?
(Aman,2020,p47,52).
Based on these expressions, it is seen that, according to Blake, the God of Christianity is the entity that needs humans worship and praise. Christian God categorises people in a single way of belief system, which makes people assiduous worshippers who do not question the purpose of their behaviours. This God, who constantly appoints chaplains to maintain his existence, sustains the belief systems of societies through these chaplains. To Blake, this God is the source of the problems people are in; the more successful people become in overcoming these problems, the closer they think they approach God. In other words, the way to reach God is not to complain about the obstacles .
He has set up on the world, but to overcome these obstacles with patience, which supports the Christian view claiming that humanity must suffer for salvation. Nevertheless, to Blake's God, the situation is the opposite. He describes his God as follows: "God wants not Man to humble himself This is the trick of ancient Elf'. Appropriately, in Blake's religious outlook, people do not believe in God for fear of punishment or to get a reward from God. Instead, they unify with God only because they love Him and know . His blessings God, who is always with man, gives power to overcome the problems, does not cause problems to test man. Therefore, people must look in to their hearts to find God in the way Blake did that is, 11 where God interacts with humankind, God rests there to meet, to talk, and to become the inner voice of man .Blake's understanding of Christianity is somehow controversial to the Christian epresentation of the English Church (Pelin, 2021,p91).
Reference
- Pelin .KUT BELENLÄ° October, 2021, 91 pages
- Mazumdar, Achsava. Blake's mysticism and symbolism with special reference to the Lamb and the Tiger." International Journal of Studies in English Language and Literature 2.2 (2014): 15-16.
- Harney, Joe W. “Worthy is the Lamb: Pastoral Allegories of Redemption in Christian Art and Music.” (2004).
- Ibrahim, Amal Ma, and Youssef Omar Babakir. Symbolism in Blake’s Animal Poems, “The Lamb and the Tiger,” a descriptive analytical study. Journal of Research in English Language and Literature 5.1 62-66: (2017).