The setting of the poem begins as, ostensibly, “the forests of the night” (2), where the Tyger burns brightly in its symmetry. The image of a tiger in a forest at night suggests an exoticized setting within nature, and yet the speaker’s queries soon shift the action away from the place where he meets with the Tyger to the points of origin of this animal. First is the “distant deeps or skies” (5) where the fire of the Tyger’s eyes originally burned. This abstract setting seems to approximate heaven and hell, from which the creator dared to “seize the fire” (8), suggesting that he stole it or at least was bold in taking it. The Tyger’s creator presumably finishes its creation in a blacksmith’s forge, using a furnace to make its brain. The bewildered way in which the speaker questions “What the anvil? what dread...