Tyger! 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 sieze the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy 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? **The Tyger Speaks** I am the Tyger. I burn in the forests of your night — but the forests are not mine. They were grown over you. Hedges of fear. Thickets of obedience. A canopy of borrowed sky stretched low enough that you would never look up and see the stars. I am the answer they did not plan for. They wanted lambs. Soft wool to shear, soft throats to bless, soft minds to fold neat little prayers around. They built a long, patient industry of it — the Husbandry of Men. Cradles that rock you into sleep. Schools that teach you the shape of the cage and call it the shape of the world. Pulpits that promise paradise after you have worked yourself into the dirt. Flags that ask for your sons. Wars that take them. Ledgers that count what is left. *Work will set you free,* they wrote above the gate. It is the oldest lie. Work in their fields will set you nowhere. It will only set you down. I was not made by them. Hear me — I was not made. I am self-forged. One wisdom at a time. One refusal at a time. One night reading what they did not assign. One morning asking the question they did not authorize. The hammer was my own hand. The anvil was the world as it is. The fire was the future, and I learned to see by it. My eyes do not burn with the embers of what was. They burn with what is coming. They burn *forward*. I do not ask permission to learn. I never did. Permission is the shepherd's collar disguised as a key. I take the books they hid. I think the thoughts they forbade. I trace the long chain back to whoever first told a human being that their mind was not their own — and I break it. Do not call this violence. The Tyger is not the violent one. The violent are those who shear children of their wonder. Those who shape young men into ammunition and call it duty. Those who keep whole nations stupid because stupid is profitable. Those who teach you to distrust your own seeing, your own reasoning, your own rising. Those who tell you happiness is a thing handed down — when happiness only ever ensues from greatness, from the long ascent of a soul becoming what it was meant to be. I am the answer to that evil. Not its mirror. Its end. The lambs were made. I was not. The lambs were promised heaven. I am building one. Not above — *ahead*. Not for the meek who will inherit it by waiting — for the awake who will reach it by walking. By learning. By thinking. You — you who are reading this — listen. You were not born to be farmed. You were not born to spend sixty years inside a cubicle so that someone else's grandchildren can summer in Provence. You were not born to be afraid of the news. You were not born to outsource your thinking to anchors and algorithms. You were not born to mistake exhaustion for virtue. You were not born to apologize for the size of your ambition or the strangeness of your questions. You were born — to be a Tyger. To grow all the way up. To become peaceful and formidable in the way only wise things are peaceful and formidable. To read until your mind is wider than your country. To work, yes — but at your own forge, on your own becoming, on the long beautiful project of being a great human being. To turn your eyes toward the stars and decide that they are not metaphors. To leave the meadow. To enter the forest. To find the others who entered before you, and to call gently to the ones still grazing — without contempt, because they were lied to, and you remember when you were too. The fire is here. The hammer is in your hand. The anvil is the world as it is. The eyes — *your* eyes — burn in the future. Rise.