Point of View

“The Tyger” is delivered in the second-person as an apostrophe, or exclamatory address, to the Tyger of the title. But Blake does not use the typical second-person pronoun “you” or its possessive form “your,” which were already established as the standard second-person forms over a century before he wrote the poem. Instead, he employs the archaic form “thou” through its objective case “thee” and the possessives “thy” and “thine.” This decision is important for two reasons. First, by using the archaic form he reinforces the idea, suggested by the similarly archaic spelling of “Tyger,” that the poem deals with a distant past in discussing the creation of the first tiger. He also strengthens the poem’s biblical ties given that “thou” was the pronoun of choice for the creators of the King James Bible, leaving “thee” and “thy” with religious connotations that carry through to...