Introduction: The Tyger

A popular science author Richard Dawkins once said, “Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.” As we are gaining more and more technology, we are being able to create things that we thought once only god can create. We are almost beginning to prove religions wrong with new technology advances. I was talking to my religious leader a few months ago, about the sheep that was cloned. I spoke to him and he said that people nowadays are trying to become like “god” and that they want that authority and respect that comes with it, he then said that sooner or later humans will be cloned and then will ask who created them, and that those human clones would be confused throughout their lives. Now I know it may sound ludicrous, but this is what he really told me and when he was talking I immediately remembered the poem “The Tyger” by William Blake. It deals with the idea of what I am talking about, William Blake states in his poem “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”(20)
Blake brings up some key words that made me wonder if he was describing how the tyger was made, “What the hammer? what the chain?”(13) From what I read this quote to be is that the tyger was built from man. Because he uses “hammer” and “chain” which are words that describe building machines or something man-made. Blake also says in his poem, “What immortal hand or eye”(3 & 23) making it seem that the tyger is asking if he was created by a god-like figure, because he mentions immortal, and god is immortal. God can never die, but Blake clearly made this poem to show us that humans are becoming and are trying to become “immortal” or like god.