Who Made the World?

On the utter radiance and unspeakable viciousness of our reality.

Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’ and William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ are poems of wonder and questions.

The Oliver poem celebrates, with trembling awe, the complicated beauty of the world and wonders about the origins of things:  

The Summer Day                                                                               

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Beginning the poem with questions (such as ‘Who made the world?’) highlights the narrator’s almost childlike standpoint which leads to a wisdom framed with more questions at the end of the poem.

The whole poem exudes a sense of amazement, and at the center of bewildered gratitude is the statement: ‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.’ There is something endearing and engaging about a narrator who admits to not knowing. This line is the gate which opens to the rest of the poem. A sense of being ‘blessed’ follows; although the narrator ‘does not know exactly what prayer is’ she is comfortable using the language of the sacred. Somehow conceding that she does not ‘know’ leads to access to the divine.   

The holiness radiating out of this moment generates questions about transience and that seemingly simple but deeply rich last question, ‘What is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?’ (This question echoes the last line of James Wright’s poem and also Rilke’s last line in ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’—each of these three last lines express the almost the same idea in different forms). The richness of Oliver’s question, in part, comes from the word ‘you’ (the first time this word is used in the poem) -- the reader is challenged, startled into attention, when addressed with ‘you’ and is asked to look at themself.  

And the word ‘wild’, a surprising and vital choice of language, is disquieting, almost frightening. We are told that our lives are ‘wild’ – perhaps the word suggests that our life can be cut off at any moment, like the grasshopper’s, and also implies that we are not fully in control of what happens to us and to what happens around us. Life is fierce and rough. And wild – anything can happen at any moment: ineffably joyful moments or devastating and everything in between.  It’s hard to face it, life is brutal: we lose people we love. And we can’t deny the unspeakable injustices and viciousness taking place in the world. And we can’t deny the utter radiance of the world. The narrator’s admission of not knowing followed by feeling blessed led to this final question: what choices will you attempt to make in your unpredictable, brutal, ecstatic, and finite life?

The Blake poem also asks childlike questions and focuses even more on wildness than the Oliver poem. It is much darker than ‘The Summer Day’ and in many ways more intense: Blake also wonders and asks questions about this world but it seems to me that the speaker is not just feeling awe and wonder but shock. It’s almost as if he can’t believe what he is asking. This shock is expressed in seemingly very simple questions, which I will paraphrase here:

1.     How is it possible that a creature as beautiful and ferocious as a tiger exists?

2.     Whoever would have created such an animal and how and why?

3.     How is it possible that the lamb could have come from the same source as the tiger?

Here is Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ (his choice of spelling):

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat.

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp.

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

‘The Tyger’ was the first proper poem I ever read. I was probably between eight and ten years old. I loved the image of the brightly colored animal in the night forests. I didn’t understand much more than that although I probably intuitively absorbed some of its meanings. Now, when looking at the poem, I am aware of the concentrated passion of Blake’s questions. This is the language of awesome intensity; the poem bristles with language like ‘burning’, ‘fearful’, ‘Seize the fire’, ‘twist the sinews’, ‘dread hand’, and ‘deadly terrors’.

The narrator is expressing his absolute astonishment that the ‘immortal hand’ could create a creature of such ferociousness – his questions suggest that the creator might have these same qualities, which is terrifying. But then comes the realization that the lamb, a very different kind of animal, exists. The origins of these creatures then is both gentle and fierce. How can such a contradiction be? Blake does not pretend to answer his questions. The whole poem is a series of questions that, like the Oliver poem, encourages the reader to step back and look at themselves, at their own animal qualities, at their own ferocity and softness, at their own questions about the sacred and the paradoxical world.