Note 1. The original draft of ‘The Tiger’, written upon two opposite pages of the Rossetti MS., enables us to follow every step in the composition of the poem. On the left-hand page is found the first rough cast of stanzas i, ii, iii, iv, and vi. In stanza iii the manuscript version throws light upon a verse which has proved a crux to many of Blake’s readers and commentators. It will be seen from the appended transcript that Blake at first intended the line
‘What dread hand and what dread feet’
as the beginning of a sentence running on into the next quatrain. Dissatisfied with the form of this unfinished stanza, he cancelled it altogether, leaving the preceding line as it stood; but subsequently, when engraving the poem for the Songs of Experience, converted the passage, by a change of punctuation into its present shape:
‘What dread hand? & what dread feet?’
a line exactly parallel in form to
‘What the hammer? what the chain?’
of the following stanza. We have yet another reading in Dr. Malkin’s Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), where the version of ‘The Tiger’, presumably supplied to the author by Blake himself, contains the variant
‘What dread hand forged thy dread feet?’
On the opposite page of the MS. Book is the first draft of stanza v, and above it, though probably written after, a revised version of ii, which differs from that finally adopted. To the right of these two stanzas follows a fair copy of i, iii, v, and vi, which, except for unimportant differences of capitalization, and the readings ‘dare frame’ for ‘could frame’ in the first, and ‘hand and eye’ for ‘hand or eye’ in the first and last stanzas, is identical with the text of the engraved Songs. The following is a faithful transcript of the original draft of ‘The Tiger’ in the MS., Blake’s variant readings being indicated typographically by placing them in consecutive order, one below another, deleted words or lines being printed in italics. The manuscript is unpunctuated throughout.
