A POEM BY WILLIAM BLAKE⠀•⠀A WOODBLOCK PRINT BY ROCKWELL KENT

For our tenth broadside, we are pleased to present William Blake’s The Tyger. Not only is The Tyger the most anthologized poem in English, but William Blake must be considered the spiritual founder of our private press movement. He published his works himself, with the aid of his wife Catherine, hand-cutting each letter of his poetry for intaglio printing, and releasing his work only in small editions. We turn back, then, to The Tyger, to celebrate both Blake’s poetry and craft.

The poem is often interpreted as a reflection on industrialization and human overreach. Blake thought that the fires of mechanized production would be the ruin of all he loved – the environment, craft and handiwork, and perhaps even the arts themselves.

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

As ever, Blake is prophetic. We here in Portland, with massive wildfires and their yellowed summer skies becoming an annual event, are increasingly experiencing the degradation of which he warned, some two hundred years ago.

The poem is printed alongside Rockwell Kent’s Tiger, originally cut for the Princeton University Tigers, but which inadvertently depicts (we believe) the spirit of Blake’s poem. A roaring tiger encircles civilization, cutting it off from a natural background. Whether or not Kent even considered Blake’s poem when he set about his work, we think the two are perfect, if accidental, partners.