Subtest Three: Practice Essay & Model Answer

Directions: Compare and contrast the two pieces below.  In a well-organized essay, dicuss each author's use of literary devices and how they relate to theme.

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, and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? and what dread feet?

 

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was they 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?

- William Blake

Excerpt from Mark Twain’s short story, “The Mysterious Stranger” (1916)

“We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant – pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more.”

“In this life, Satan, but in another?  We shall meet in another, surely?”

 

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, “There is no other…Have you never suspected this, Theodor?  Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”

 

It was electrical.  By God!  I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!  Satan continued:

 

“Nothing exists; all is a dream.  God – man - the world – the sun the moon, the wilderness of stars – a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.  Nothing exists save empty space – and you!”

 

“Strange! that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!  Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane – like all dreams; a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness - and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”

 

          “You perceive now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream.”

 

          He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

 

Sample Essay – Twain/Blake

 

Both William Blake and Mark Twain pose the question, “How could God allow evil in the world?” In “The Tyger” Blake uses visual imagery to present God as a blacksmith, using “hammer, chain, furnace, and anvil” to forge “the Tyger” – a symbol of evil.  Blake's God works skillfully to create the  “fearful symmetry” of evil.  Through this imagery, Blake suggests that evil is no accident, but was carefully and intentionally constructed by God.  But what kind of a God?  Blake’s curiosity about that question is made evident through repetition.  Through the use of parallel structure, he asks, “what shoulder, and what art” would a God possess who is capable of creating evil? 

 

Blake wonders if, after creating evil, God was proud of himself.  (“Did he smile his work to see?”)  He uses biblical allusion to ponder how the same God who created Jesus (the “lamb of God,” symbolizing good) could create it’s opposite: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

 

In the end, Blake has no answer, and reinforces this uncertainty by repeating his first stanza, as if to indicate that questioning God can only lead to more questions.  The “symmetry” of “the tyger" is echoed in this symmetrical return to the beginning. 

 

Twain does more than merely question how God could create evil.  In his short story, “Mysterious Stranger,” he answers the question.  In this first person narrative in the form of a remembered dialogue between Satan and a boy named Theodor, Satan eloquently explains that, if there were a God, he would be guilty of horrendous evil.  Satan’s diction is seductively poetic, incorporating alliteration (“miseries and maladies of mind,”) and repetition (“strange…strange”).  The God of Satan’s description is a hypocrite, creating man, who is capable of “crimes” and then punishing him for them.  This God "mouths morals to other people and has none himself" and "frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all…”  God not only created evil, but, as Satan repeats, “invented hell.”  But rather than simply questioning God’s motives as Blake does, Twain answers the question: “How could such a God exist?” through Satan’s simple answer: he doesn’t: “God – man – the world -  the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars” are all a dream.”

 

Twain's explanation for evil in the world: the nonexistence of God, highlights the greatest difference between these two pieces: tone.  Blake’s sing-song, simple diction and nursery rhyme-like trochaic rhythm create an innocent, pensive tone which matches his childlike questioning about God.  His questions, he allows, may have answers which are beyond human comprehension.  Twain’s speaker, the smooth and eloquent Satan, allows no such possibility.  His criticism of God’s hypocrisy is not pensive or unsure, but absolute.  For a God to exist who would allow the suffering of man is simply “impossible.”  

 

 

 

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