What critical lenses and literary criticisms are related for William Blake's "The Lamb" and "The Tyger"?

 

The Lamb and the Tyger are Blake's most popular symbols for innocence and experience respectively. The Lamb from Songs of Innocence is written from the perspective of a young child who speaks to a little lamb and asks him if he knows who his creator is. Almost immediately upon putting across the question, the child proceeds to provide the lamb with an answer:

"He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb."

Here, the child makes a direct reference to Jesus Christ who is also known as the "Lamb of God" in the Bible. By saying that the Creator is known by the lamb's name, he dismisses any hierarchy between the Creator and the Creation. He later also goes onto say:

"He became a little child:

[...] We are called by his name."

The child and the lamb, both symbols of innocence are put on the same plane as God himself, thereby creating a new holy trinity - Man, Nature and God, as opposed to the traditional trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost which institutionalised religion uses to establish domination and fear. Blake, for whom humanity and divinity are interchangeable, shuns the corrupted figureheads of religion who have falsified the original pristine form of Christianity and who posit God as a malevolent figure. Blake's God is a more forgiving, benevolent spirit. Also, for him, God, Man and Nature are fused, morphed into a single entity. We may then assume that the child and the lamb are figures of innocence precisely because they have discovered the existence of God within their own selves. There is a sense of certainty in the bold and confident manner in which the child undoubtedly claims to know the Creator. And this is because he understands that the Creator resides within him. It is this vision of Blake that has led to scholars like Martin K. Nurmi claiming him to be "the most extreme humanist of all time". A direct communion with God, with Nature is what then, according to Blake, allows us to exist in a state of innocence, of purity On the other hand, experience is known through a void, or an absence of divinity. All characters in Blake's Songs of Experience, for instance the Chimney Sweeper, the Little Boy Lost, the Little Girl Lost, suffer from abandonment and lack of a protective figure. 

 "The Tyger" exhibit opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems are dramatic—that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. 

 "The Lamb" directly tells us that the child knows the creator to be God, while in "The Tyger" the creator question is not answered; it is left hanging for the reader to figure it out. The author asks if the same mighty hand that created the sweet and innocent lamb could be the same hand that created the fearful and dreadful tiger. This is shown in the fifth stanza when Blake says, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Though these poems are similar in that they ask the creator question, they are different in the way that the question is asked. In "The Tyger", Blake presents his question in Lines 3 and 4 in a more arrogant way, "What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?", while in the Lamb, the question is "Little Lamb who made thee/ Dost thou know who made thee" (lines 9 & 10).