¹ See, for example, Martin K. Nurmi, “Blake's Revisions of ‘The Tyger’,” PMLA, lxxi (1956), 680: “The real climax, of course, which resolves everything, is the word ‘Dare’ that is substituted for ‘Could’ in the closing return to the strophic stanza,” and Joseph X. Brennan, “The Symbolic Framework of Blake's ‘The Tyger’,” CE, xxii (1961), 406–407: “Into the word dare ... converge all the terrifying implications of the question posed with mounting intensity and deepening significance in the foregoing stanzas.” Equally emphatic statements about the importance of dare are made by Joseph Wicksteed, Blake's Innocence and Experience (London, 1928), pp. 199–200; Roy P. Basler, Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature (New Brunswick, N. J., 1948), pp. 22–23; Hazard Adams, “Reading Blake's Lyrics: ‘The Tyger’,” Discussions of William Blake, ed. John E. Grant (Boston, 1961), p. 60; and others, all of whom leave unclarified the ambiguity as to the tense of dare.

² Discussions of William Blake, ed. John E. Grant, p. 67. Some of the consequences of this assumption of a present subjunctive dare are developed further on pp. 73 and 75. The same points are made in an earlier version of this essay published in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, ii (1960), 38–60.

³ “Contemplation,” The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York, 1957), p. 36. All quotations are from this edition.

⁴ “The Mental Traveller,” ll. 46–47.

⁵ Ibid., ll. 97–98.

⁶ “Milton” ii.xxxxi.56–57.

⁷ “Jerusalem” ii.xxvi.44–46.

⁸ Ibid., i.xvii.6–7.

⁹ “Vala” (Night the Seventh [a]), ll. 46–47.

¹⁰ Choices among various possible past tense forms still exist, of course, in several modern English verb paradigms. Compare, for example, the situation of the modern speaker who wants to express the past tense of bid: Is it bade, bad, bidded, or simply bid (which is identical with the present)?

¹¹ In quoting works published in the eighteenth century or later I have cited, unless otherwise stated, first editions. Where I have not cited first editions, I have cited early editions which are still widely available. In all cases I have, of course, checked the readings in several editions to guard against the possibility of typographical errors or tacit modernization.

¹² Although a past participle rather than a simple preterite, this form is of special interest as an illustration of the flux within the paradigm of dare and particularly of the surprising range of tense functions which dare could be made to serve. See further the following note.

¹³ Here dare seems to be serving as a preterite subjunctive, the more common form of which would be durst or would dare. The preterite subjunctive use of dare occurs more than once in the nineteenth century. Robert Southey received a letter from the distinguished clergyman Andrew Bell which contained the sentence, “I wish I dare put them down among our books.” (26 December 1811; see The Life of the Reverend Andrew Bell, ii, by Charles Southey, London, 1844, 651.) And as late as 1861 Charlotte Eliza Riddell provides a particularly clear example of the preterite subjunctive dare following, in this instance, a preterite indicative dare: “He dare as much have opposed his wife's whims during the time she dwelt in the Mansion House, as he dare have committed high treason ...” (City and Suburb, London, 1861, ii, 267).

¹⁴ In these two verbs, of course, it was the preterite rather than the present form which came to usurp the function of both past and present tenses. But in the case of must, at least, the direction of the syncretism was not always the same. The OED s.v. Mote v.¹, 2b, indicates that on occasion Spenser and Henry More used the present form mote in preterite sense. Moreover, the preterite durst has sometimes been employed in present tense functions (see OED s.v. Dare v.¹, i, 5; Chaucer, “The Nun's Priest's Tale,” ll. 2918–2919; Shakespeare, Othello iv.ii.12–13). Joseph Wright states that in British dialects “the preterite is constantly used for the present” (EDD s.v. dare v.¹, i, 1). Finally, in modern English we have examples of two recently developed modal auxiliaries—need and use (to)—which are following precisely the same course of development toward preterite functions as did dare in Blake's day: cf. such expressions as “He fretted, but he need not worry, for it was all going according to plan,” and “He use not to say things like that to me.” See further Englische Studien, xxxiii (1897), 460–462.

¹⁵ My explanation of the origin of dare-preterite through analogy differs from that offered originally, I believe, by Gregor Sarrazin in Englische Studien, xxxii (1896), 334, and developed by Jespersen, who says, “The chief explanation probably is that in the combination daredn't the sound d was crowded out phonetically ... and that this form was then transferred to other cases.” (See A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Part iv, Vol. iii: Time and Tense, Heidelberg, 1931, 12.) Considering the early date and the frequency of dare-preterites without a following negative, which I have documented above, I feel that the phonetic explanation needs supplementing, at very least, and the analogies I suggest here must have been an important, if not the sole, factor.

It should be mentioned that the great Oxford English Dictionary has not entirely overlooked the usage of dare as a preterite in Modern English, but it gives the form short shrift. Under Dare v.¹, A.1.c., the OED says, “The present dare has been carelessly used for the past dared or durst,” and the dictionary then lists five examples of this “careless” usage, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In view of the numerous literary uses of dare-preterite which I have listed, and especially in view of its use in Blake's finely wrought poem, the OED's entry would seem to stand in need of revision.

¹⁶ My comments upon the early drafts are based upon the facsimiles of the note-book copies published in Wicksteed's Blake's Innocence and Experience, Keynes's The Notebook of William Blake (London, 1935), and Bunsho Jugaku's A Bibliographical Study of William Blake's Notebook (Tokyo, 1953), as well as the excellent transcription of Nurmi, PMLA, lxxi (1957), 683–685, and that of Jugaku.

¹⁷ “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” viii. 4, 7–9. These sentences, along with other passages from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” are aptly cited in this connection by Hazard Adams, pp. 48 and 50.

¹⁸ My paraphrase of Blake's twist by “spin” runs counter to previous scholarly interpretations of this stanza, which generally assume that the image intended here is that of a blacksmith or at least that it “begins to suggest the image of a blacksmith which becomes manifest in the next stanza” (Grant, p. 46). But the verb twist, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, had the specific meaning “to form (a thread or cord) by spinning the yarns or strands” (OED s.v. Twist v. ii, 3–4). Spinning is a more appropriate way of producing “sinews” than blacksmithing would be, and, moreover, recognition of the spinning image may clear up the hitherto unsolved crux of “and what dread feet” in line 12, where critics have wondered what part feet could have in twisting sinews. In the art of spinning, of course, feet as well as hands are employed and have been in spinning techniques since the sixteenth century. (That Blake, in his final revision, had no intention of representing the entire act of creation as a forging, incidentally, is made apparent by the fact that the “eyes” in stanza two are not the product of a smithy at all.) Interestingly enough, the specific sense of twist was identified, apparently, by Blake's contemporary Nicolaus Heinrich Julius who, in Vaterländisches Museum, ii (1811), 127, translated twist into German as wob. A transcription of Julius's rendering of “The Tyger” may be seen in The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. John Sampson (Oxford, 1905), p. 115, where, however, it is misdated by five years and incorrectly transcribed in a number of places.