Questioning Creation

Questioning Creation

Robert Frost's Design and William Blake's The Tyger both use animals and nature to argue evolution and against creationism. Both poems ask the question "why?" repetitively in order to get the reader to question his creationist beliefs. The difference lies in which aspect of living things the poets use to question away the reader’s creation beliefs. Frost tries to get the reader to come to the conclusion that while everything is so intricate there is no specific reason for the existence of any one thing and therefore there is no creator behind everything. Blake claims that it is not logical or possible for the same creator to create things so natural, robotic, peaceful and fierce, and that these could only be created through randomness.

Frost begins temporarily masking his anti-creationist agenda by starting Design describing a scene so articulate and metaphorical that it appears that his point is going to be that all of this is designed by a master creator. However when he reaches the volta with "What had that flower to do with being white" he makes us question why would a creator make a flower white. This question is rhetorical and tells us that there is no reason for this occurrence, logical or otherwise and leads us to believe that there was no intended reason for the creation of anything. This then develops into the implication that if there was no reason for the creation of anything then it probably all just came to be without the aid of a creator. The questioning Frost does is his way of directly attacking creationism instead of using subtle implications.

Even Without using questioning Frost ties doubt to creationism in a more subtle manner at the beginning of his poem. Frost obviously chose the spider's capture of the moth for a reason. If his goal was to make all of us in awe of god's creations the scene would be much more tranquil and desirable than the end of the life of one creature at the hands of another. This scene begs the question why would a creator design and bring to life a creature such as a moth solely for it to be captured and devoured by another “creation”. Also, there neither a stated nor implied reason for the spider to be fat or dimpled other than to seem ugly and monstrous while consuming the moth. Frost tells us not of the spider reaching true happiness or teaching us a lesson because of these traits, just that they simply are. This leads us to believe that the spider needs to eat the moth to survive so it does so, not because it is the will of a creator.

In The Tyger Blake tries to make us come to the same conclusion as Frost does and also disguises his true meaning in the beginning. While he starts right from the first stanza asking “What immortal hand or eye Could frame Thy Fearful Symmetry?” it appears although the answer is God, the creator of all. But Blake wanes from creationism in the fourth stanza with questions such as "What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?”. These lines make us compare the natural beauty of a tiger to the cold mechanistic real world, filled with forges, chains, and furnaces. Even though Blake is still talking about the tiger, it poses the question why would a creator create a natural animal with such fierceness and intricacy and have it exist in a world with the industrial things used to describe the tiger. If Blake wants to agree with creationism he would include an answer to all the whys instead of leaving them unanswered which gives us the impression that there is no answer, no reason behind their existence, and therefore no creator.

Blake's line "Did He who make the lamb make thee?" poses to us the question how could two animals so incredibly different be created by the same hands. The lamb is known as a symbol of innocence and purity and the tiger is a symbol of aggression, fear and power. We are forced to wonder why and how a creator would and could create two beings so different and seemingly uncoexistable. The last line of the poem differs from the first line by changing “could” to “dare”. This seemingly small change magnifies how scary and unpredictable the tiger is and implies that nobody who was designing a world, specifically a world where man was to live would create such a threat. Either the creator is daring man to defeat it or there is no creator and the tiger is just another random being wandering the planet. Because Blake spends a large portion of the poem dehumanizing the tiger the final line implies that Blake indeed believes that there is no creator because no creator would create such a beast.

In both Frost’s Design and Blake’s The Tyger the authors using questioning to generate doubts about the validity of creationism and the existence of a creator. Both poems begin without directly denouncing it and glide in to more resonating questions as the poems develop. They differ in that Design questions why would a creator bother with such detail and The Tyger questions how could a creator design a creature so unnatural and mechanical but both adequately place doubt into the accepted beliefs of the time.