William Blake engraved Songs of Experience in 1794, printing each page himself from a copper plate he had drawn and lettered by hand — text and picture in one image, coloured by him one copy at a time. The Tyger is its best-known page, the dark twin of The Lamb in the earlier Songs of Innocence.
The whole poem is questions and never an answer. Twenty-four lines, and almost every one asks who could have made this animal — what hand, what eye, what hammer, what furnace, what daring — until the fourth stanza turns a blacksmith's forge into the making of a living thing, and the fifth asks the one that matters: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? The maker of the gentle thing and the maker of the terrible thing are the same, and the poem will not say how that can be.
Blake's own hand is all over it — the spelling Tyger, the sieze, the ampersands, the odd stops that fall mid-line. Editors have tidied them for two hundred years; this page leaves them, because they are what he cut into the plate.