Anatomy of The Tiger

Nael, age 6, and the Shield of Youth

Someone on Twitter asked for a ‘serious analysis’ of this poem. I’ve seen a couple of other people write about it excellently while leaving various depths unplumbed.¹ So here’s my brief addition to the critical literature.

The Poem

The Tiger

by Nael (age 6)
from They’re Singing a Song in their Rocket

The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out

The Punch

The rhetorical impact comes partly from the conciseness of the poem and of each of its lines. It also comes partly from the lack of punctuation, whose effect is to create an ambiguity between narrative and stream of consciousness. Compare the following two rewrites:

The tiger, he destroyed his cage. Yes, yes, the tiger is out.

The tiger he destroyed his cage yes YES the tiger is out

The former is too calm and objective, and the latter is too inward—it speaks more to the mind of the observer than to the tiger’s escape. But with the linebreaks in the place of the punctuation marks, the poet sacrifices neither the sense of reality nor the exhilaration of the observer. We feel the excitement and chaos of the moment (if you tend towards to liberal analogising you might say the lack of punctuation mirrors the lack of constraints on the uncaged tiger), and we feel them happening in real time.

The Pattern

The passage of that time is overlaid on the frame of a pure chiasmus. A chiasmus, you will remember, is a form where equivalent relationships between two similar pairs of ideas are put back to back, creating reflectional symmetry:

Now thou’st mossy death thy headrest,
Pillows were an end to thee.²

(Here you could map it as death:headrest::pillows:end.)

You can interpret the entirety of The Tiger in this shape. ‘The tiger/He destroyed his cage’, the beginning of the poem, is equivalent to ‘The tiger is out’, the end of the poem, while the ‘yes’ and ‘YES’ are obviously equivalent in some way. But it’s not total symmetry (which would be called antimetabole), because the second of each is very much more emphatic. The capitalisation of ‘yes’ and the shortening of the outer phrase from six words over two lines to four words on one serve to create a rapid escalation in intensity. There is no great resolution afterwards, which suits the narrative. The tiger is out, and to hear what happens next would spoil the story. ‘In case I don’t see you…’.

The Poet

Liam Kofi Bright imagines watching the tiger escape.

Well as an adult I guess I would say some combination of fascinated by how the tiger managed this, afraid, curious as to how the zoo messed up this bad, afraid, wondering what happens next, and, did I mention, afraid? On account of the angry tiger now running about? 

None of that matters to Nael. Our poet is focussed on one and only one thing about this scenario: how fucking cool it is. A tiger is breaking out of its cage. How cool is that? Now there's a tiger running about! Tigers are so cool! Breaking out of cages is inherently cool! It's a tiger!

He’s right. But the reason we understand this about Nael is because of what you might call lines minus one and two of the poem:

by Nael (age 6)
from They’re Singing a Song in their Rocket

We are free to join Nael in his simple thrill because we have already been told he is six. We were all six once, and even the most jaded of us fancy we remember a different time, when we took unironic delight in things. Imagine those lines instead were

by Walter Featherstonhaugh (age 57)
from Songs of the Revolution

I mean no particular ill to posh communist poets, but The Tiger would simply not have the same liberating effect. So when people ask how a six-year-old could write such a powerful poem, the answer is that it is precisely from Nael’s age that that power stems.

The picture

Images (in the literary sense) can be wonderful, but sometimes straight depictions can be even better. Emily Dickinson says that Hope is the thing with feathers. Friedrich Schiller says that Joy gave us kisses and vines. Nael, aged 6, has no need for such fancies. He simply writes elation straight onto the page, and we in rare wisdom, read it straight back up.

1. Liam Kofi Bright here and Brett Milam here.

2. from the anonymous ‘Song of the Country Mourner’