The Tyger

The Tyger enters the closing scene as a remembered poem that gives Allison Healy a way to read Thobela Mpayipheli’s stillness and power. Recalling William Blake while she looks at him, Allison silently invokes the poem’s questions about fearful symmetry, burning eyes, and the making of a fierce creature. The allusion changes the scene from an observation of Mpayipheli’s body into a meditation on the frightening force it seems to contain, and on what it means to create or confront such force.

The poem recalled in the scene

Allison’s memory begins with the poem’s most direct question: “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” She is looking at Mpayipheli, whose dark brown chest and arms stand out against white bedding and whose body suggests, in the narration’s image, “the undulations of caged power.” The visual contrast makes the remembered line newly immediate: symmetry is not simply beauty or order here, but a form that holds something formidable in check. The poem’s question about the hand or eye that framed the tiger turns attention toward the making of power, while Allison’s view of Mpayipheli makes that question bodily and unsettling.

The scene does not present the poem as a diagnosis or claim that Mpayipheli is literally a tiger. Instead, its fragmentary quotation supplies an analogy through which Allison tries to understand him. His stillness and contained strength make the poem’s fearful creature an apt image, but the allusion also preserves a difference between the image and the man. Allison is interpreting what she sees; the poem gives her questions, not a definitive explanation of Mpayipheli’s nature.

Eyes, silence, and apprehension

The next remembered lines shift from the creature’s form to the source of its gaze: “In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes?” Their placement follows Allison’s realization that Mpayipheli’s eyes have an intensity she had not understood before. When she asks what he said, she is told, “He hasn’t said a word since.” Silence therefore precedes the poem’s burning eyes: Mpayipheli has not explained himself, and Allison must read the force of his presence without the reassurance of speech.

That silence does not make him passive. Allison looks from Mpayipheli to Zatopek van Heerden and recognizes worry in him for the first time. When Zatopek says that it is not Mpayipheli who will need help, Allison understands what he fears and shivers as she looks back at Mpayipheli. The poem’s image now carries a threat as well as a sense of awe. Its question about the fire in the eyes becomes part of Allison’s recognition that the danger may lie not in Mpayipheli’s vulnerability but in what he might do. The allusion makes her change of understanding legible without claiming that she knows what will happen.

Creation, violence, and the lamb

Later fragments widen the poem’s questions beyond the tiger’s appearance. “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears” is followed by the paired questions “Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?” The juxtaposition of the lamb and the tiger gives the scene a language for incompatible possibilities: creation can encompass both the vulnerable and the fearsome. Set beside Mpayipheli, these lines sharpen the problem of how great power relates to harm, but the passage offers no simple answer about whether such force is made, chosen, or controlled.

The allusion’s force comes partly from this unresolved tension. Mpayipheli is at once a still figure and a body described through restrained power; Allison’s fear recognizes danger, while the poem’s questions prevent that danger from becoming a complete account of him. Rather than equating strength with evil, the recalled lines place fierce power within a larger question about its origin and its relation to gentleness. The lamb does not erase the tiger, and the tiger does not explain away the lamb.

The allusion’s final counterpoint

On the last leg to Cape Town, Allison wakes with a heavy body and stiff neck and sees Zatopek sitting beside Mpayipheli, holding the Xhosa man’s hand. Above the engine noise she hears Mpayipheli speaking softly. His words turn to the possibility of leaving and to the question of whether men are made to keep going away: “…Go away, Van Heerden? Is that part of our genetic make-up too? Is that what makes us men? Always off somewhere?” The quiet voice complicates the image framed by The Tyger. The scene that had made Mpayipheli appear almost like a force under restraint ends with him speaking about departure and what makes men leave.

The poem thus marks a shift in Allison’s perception rather than settling Mpayipheli’s meaning. Its fearful eyes and immense power help her grasp Zatopek’s worry; its questions about creation and the lamb keep that fear from being the final word. By placing the allusion beside Mpayipheli’s silence, Zatopek’s concern, and the later intimate gesture of holding his hand, the passage preserves both danger and human connection without resolving their tension.