Tyger, Tyger and The Sun God
Art and Life Come Full Circle
William Blake’s Tyger Tyger, 1794
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 seize the fire? And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and 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?
Steve, Blake and Anna.
Stephen Brophy’s niece Anna Ward grew up with one of her uncle’s most singular works, a painting called The Sun King. She writes,
It was, and remains a sensory safe place for me, because I spent hours with that painting. Literally, it was the one constant. Turns out, this painting was a result of Steve’s first experience with Blake, reading Tyger!
We both loved the poem.The painting was his understanding of the poem when he was a much younger man. I’m looking at the painting right now and am clearly hearing Steve still speak to it — through the painting, through Blake.
In 1961, trying to reconcile contrary forces of religion and other struggles in his life, Steve destroyed ten years of work, in fact everything he had done until that point. Already the father of a one-year old and living on City Island in the Bronx, he took a religious Odyssey to Rome. He didn’t find what he was seeking there and eventually returned to life with his family and a job in construction.
The Sun King was the first painting after this period of intense doubt and uncertainty. From talking to Steve about this time, Anna learned the painting was directly tied to his understanding of Blake, specifically this part of the poem: What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
In other words, the Sun King — in a fiery background, only his cruel mask showing, his face barely visible to us — was the side of God that could create a tiger, capable of deadly destruction.
More than fifty years later, Steve repairs the painting’s peeling paint and damaged surface and ships it across country to Anna, now living in Seattle with her husband and children. Though it was hard for him to part with something so pivotal to his lifework as an artist and to his journey as a person, he was grateful that Anna wanted it, that it meant equally as much to her.
Funny, I was never partial to the painting. But I was also not privy to what it signified in Steve’s young adult life, nor in Anna’s, nor the bond it cemented between them. In thinking of a world that gives us both tigers and lambs, I appreciate Anna’s words: “What Uncle Steve wanted to do was to paint the universe that Blake laid out for him.”
If The Sun King represented the merciless hand of God, then Steve wanted one of his last artistic acts to be the closing, to create a work that took in Blake’s acceptance, as in: 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?
Steve had come full circle, his own “fearful symmetry.”
The Sun King marked the start of Steve’s journey as an artist that, like Blake at the beginning of the poem, was more Tyger than Lamb. But, now at the end, he was ready to let go, paint again after a long break and be the Lamb. Only he didn’t get the chance. Anna again:
This spoke to him more than anything else now — and the humility and acceptance that come with recognizing when you are at peace with yourself. It made me weep that he didn’t get to paint this vision before he passed.
I will always love The Sun King. It’s not for everyone. But for me, it is everything solid and real in this world. I wish more than anything that he could have lived long enough to paint the stars throwing down their spears at the feet of the Lamb in a clearing in the forest.
I loved him as much as I did, because Steve, once we got past the outer layer, was always real with me and always allowed me to be who I was without trying to force me to be anything I wasn’t.
I would say that Steve lived by these same words.