Other Tiger, The Analysis

A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here

Exalts the vast and busy Library

And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;

Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek

It wanders through its forest and its day

Printing a track along the muddy banks

Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know

(In its world there are no names or past

Or time to come, only the vivid now)

And makes its way across wild distances

Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells

And in the wind picking the smell of dawn

And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;

Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse

The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame

Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.

Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us

Apart in vain; from here in a house far off

In South America I dream of you,

Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.



It strikes me now as evening fills my soul

That the tiger addressed in my poem

Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols

And scraps picked up at random out of books,

A string of labored tropes that have no life,

And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel

That under sun or stars or changing moon

Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling

Its rounds of love and indolence and death.

To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed

The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot

As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,

And that today, this August third, nineteen

Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;

But by the act of giving it a name,

By trying to fix the limits of its world,

It becomes a fiction not a living beast,

Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.



We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like

The others this one too will be a form

Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not

The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths

Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,

Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me

In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,

And I go on pursuing through the hours

Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

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