TAME MY TIGER

"Sister Sister
Won't you tame my tiger
Sister Sister
Won't you tame my tiger
Won't you give me your love
Real Wild

Mister Mister
Won't you join my priestess
Mister Mister       
Won't you join my priestess
If you do my love
I'm yours

Baby - Lady
Won't you tame my tiger
Baby - Lady
Won't you tame my tiger
Won't you give me your love       
Right now"
                      Marc Bolan - Dandy In The Underworld

This song may be considered as a minor artistic input by Marc Bolan, actually a B-side to the single presenting the title track of Marc Bolan's last official album, DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD. The lyrics are quite simplistic and we wouldn't have considered them had Marc Bolan not used two very important words: tiger and priestess.

Now, "Sister Sister Won't you tame my tiger" immediately reminds us of William Blake's poem: "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?..."* from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. William Blake is among the authors Marc Bolan reads and Marc loves to include references to his favourite writers in his songs. "The Tyger" has been one of the most frequently explained poems in English literature. In fact, the width and depth of attention the poem receives testifies to its ability to contain a multitude of plausible, although at times widely divergent, interpretations. Critics have gone even farther so that many articles are devoted only to individual segments of the poem. Tigers were the symbol of a special terror for the eighteenth century imaginative minds. Thomas Bewick's  (published 1790, 1811), describes the tiger as "the most rapacious and destructive of all carnivorous animals." The tiger is "fierce without provocation, and cruel without necessity, its thirst for blood is insatiable."

"Sister Sister / Won't you tame my tiger / Won't you give me your love / Real Wild"  To tame a tiger, one must be a special person or someone with a special power. Thus Marc Bolan asks for his tiger to be tamed with a special kind of love, "real wild" - nothing else could succeed. He knows his life is on the edge and time flies. He should be thirty years old soon and on many occasion Marc Bolan said he would die before he would be 30. Now, does he really believe this could be true? On the other hand, he cannot stop from thinking this could also be real thus the urgency to live in the fast lane, to live his life to the fullest - there is no alternative: « Sometimes I get a funny feeling inside me that I shan't be here very long, and I'm not talking in terms of things like success. It frightens me sometime. » « I don't hink I'll live that long. » 

Raine writes in his studies that "Like the Tyger, Blake's subsequent tigers also exemplify man in the grip of selfhood - malevolent and stupid." And this is probably true for Marc Bolan as well, thus the need to call for someone who could "tame his tiger": "I'm all for anyone who's an exhibitionist. You don't want to be like everyone else. You've got to be different". "Although I've matured I'm still a poseur and an egotist. I'm marvellous and I don't care what people say about me, I know I'm good".

In the second verse, Marc gives the lead to Gloria who replies: "Mister Mister / Won't you join my priestess / If you do my love / I'm yours". Once again, Marc Bolan confirms that only someone special, a priestress in this case, can succeed. Another writer, Fred Kaplan (in 1972), regards Blake's poem as a moment of the recognition of one's own claim to divinity. "Blake the artist," writes Kaplan, "does not fear to record his immortality; in fact, he stands in awe before his own fearlessness." This is the Marc Bolan who said: "Pop should be a spell" and "My name will live on - I'm a life style."  . Marc Bolan never hesitates, he dares and... he also pays the price. He lives in the extremes: when he drinks, he could drink a whole sea as did "Uncle Bimbo" in The Leopards **.

Furthermore, if in 1986, in , Gardner regards Blake's poem as a short cosmic history "which takes the mind back through the poem and beyond . . . in a search of `his' identity, `he' who has been there all along, having created the tiger the poem invokes " - if so many writers can actually write so many essays on Blake's poem, it is certainly no wonder Marc Bolan has used the same analogy in his simple but very catchy song.

** ("Uncle Bimbo drunk up the sea of Galilee And like a fool he promised it all to me").

*THE TYGER / William Blake
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 sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & 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?
                          from Songs of Innocence and of Experience