Who does the lamb and the tyger symbolize in blake's poem?

Question:

Who does the lamb and the tyger symbolize in blake's poem?

Why the sudden shift in perception and what changes might have taken place in Blake's beliefs?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The clue is in Blake's title for the anthology, "Songs of Innocence and Experience" Did He who made the Lamb,make thee? The tyger burning bright in the forests of the night is our experience, the passions which seethe just below the level of our consciousness. Blake did not see these emotions as evil, as the rationalists who immediately preceded the Romantic Age did, but saw in them the fire of creation, something good, vibrant, and positive. Many saw in this also a wider cosmology told in the night skies with meteor showers. Blake's mystical vision is also told through his illustration. The tyger on his page wears a benign, almost docile expression, not the violence of wrath. The Lamb (capitalized in Blake's poem) is the Lamb of God, Christ. The lamb is innocence, the balancing force. Blake used the Lamb symbolically as a redemptive figure in some of his other poetry. On the mystical level the Lamb achieves victory through self-sacrifice. The shift takes place in our perception, Blake's intent. There were no changes in his beliefs. God created both Tyger and Lamb. The change in spelling was to insure the value and pronunciation which carries the metre of the poem as well as identification with the revolutionary figure Marat.

Blake was a very controversial figure in his day. There were many men of letters who were angered by the dissemination of his poetry and religious and philosophical views, but they could do absolutely nothing about it since he published and distributed them by his own hand at his own expense. Many who criticised him found themselves quoting his poetry from memory, thus diseminating it themselves. His artwork is brilliant and typography superior to most of that in England of his day. He came to be greatly admired by others of the Romantic Movement including William Wordsworth, who included this poem in his anthologies, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, even though he misquoted the poem.