Thoughts?

Not bad. I enjoyed it before I even seen his age

the YES is just so primal it can move your emotions

This kid has serious potential

Damn this is actually good. I unironically wish I wrote that

It's an affirmation of the inner search for freedom. Then combined with the idealistic last line, in which the destruction of the cage allows the tiger to be free, the poem presents a scathing attack of modern reality, speaking to the dying hope that we've repressed in all of us, since we all know what should be is not what is and that's the deepest, most pervasive pain one can endure

I'd ride it.

>They're Singing A Song In Their Rocket
Dang, even the book title's good

What if that is the wrong interpretation and the tiger is not free at all? How sure are we that the referent "He" in "He destroyed his cage" is not to be interpreted as "Nael destroyed the tiger's cage"? The person exclaiming yes is possibly six year old Nael. Like some sort of perverted pyromaniac who films himself burning down warehouses, Nael goes around opening cages of wild animals in the zoo unleashing bloodthirsty predators onto families, like Damian from the Omen movies.

>Rupi Kaur will NEVER be as good as a 6-year-old kid

He just told you that the tiger is free. How dare you mistrust the creator?

I always assumed nael was a female name for a child, but that could be a more interesting interpretation.
Perhaps the animals are not set free, and instead are burned alive. So, when an animal is "out", they have merely been forcibly removed from the mortal coil, and this is the true freedom Nael recognises. Being 6 years old yet having cursed all 6 of those years, she rejoices as tamed animals roar and writhe in agony, having been given the greatest gift of all: death

YES

the tiger
is out

I don't believe a kid wrote this. His parents had to have helped with this

Be honest here, would you guys still praise it if she wrote it?

The poem works very well in its own right, but I'd also recommend reading it alongside Blake's The Tyger (obviously) and Aravind Adiga's novel The White Tiger.

Not that good.

I believe Roger Waters' "When The Tigers Broke Free" could be interesting supplementary material too.

A rupi kaur poem wouldn't go like that, it would be like The man
He destroyed
My heart.
but
BUT
I am a strong
Woman.

It's a pretty childish poem desu, not that there's anything wrong with that. Kids have different mindsets and its refreshing to explore with them after debilitating years of adulthood.

No need to be so bitter, Rupi

See

I don't like when people don't use punctuation marks.

Punctuation slows and separates. Nael's poem is a white knuckle roller-coaster that builds to a destructive crescendo. Asking for punctuation in it is like asking for lube when you're getting gangraped

I should start sharing my childhood poetry here desu

tippity top kek

powerful

Actually The Tiger does form a fascinating companion to The Tyger, especially if you consider historical context.

In Blake's period, the tiger represented the wild in a very literal way- I'm sure plenty of people were still bring killed by tigers and other wild animals in Asia. But there are hints in the poem of the coming industrial order- 'furnace', 'hammer', and most tellingly 'chain' - that would domesticate the 'forest of the night' and put the tiger safely in its cage.

In our thoroughly industrialised age, Nael age 6 returns to the subject of the tiger- and gives us a powerful affirmation of Blake's original message and a riposte to the hubris of modernity. Nature can never be wholly controlled- the tiger is out.

...there's also a metatextual element here. Although Blake celebrated the untrammelled imagination, he actually wrote in scrupulously regular, rhyming lines- obviously, since in his age this is what poetry was.

Nael age 6, on the other hand, draws on the legacy of modernism and concrete poetry, giving the poem a liberated form which truly matches its theme. Arguably the 'tiger' of Nael's poem stands for poetry, or the imagination itself, set free from its cage. There is a deeply ambiguous attitude towar modernity here, which is only fitting given modernity's deeply ambiguous nature.

Unfiltered, pure Ecstasy. Art without constraints, a story told in few words, but with much power

Excellent stuff

...

...

...mentioning Asia also makes me realise that you can read The Tiger as a postcolonial work too, with the animal standing for the colonies that destroyed their imperial cages.

Damn, this poem is rich af tbphwy

We are the tiger.

If the tiger stands for poetry, than the realisation that the tiger is out would actually be the realisation that poetry as an artform is losing its relevance, playing on the meaning of the word "out". Or, it could mean
If it is imagination, it could be a reference to imaginative theology that explores and explains all the depths of the human experience being replaced by modernity, implying a loss of relevance with the same multifaceted wordplay. The physical cage of imagination is required for imagination to exist, if imagination leaves the brain then humanity has abandoned it.

Good point. This is one of the things I love about the poem- whatever reading you give it, there's always an ambiguity there, despite the doubled, capitalised 'yes'. Sure, it's free and that's great- but it's also a fucking tiger. The idea of freedom meaning loss gives it still more levels of meaning.

>Or it could mean
I did have a thought here but I lost it

The thought is out

yes
YES
The thought is free.

Bravo Nael, you're on your way to being the next Rupi Kaur.

The tampon
It broke.
The blood.
Flowed.
YES!
yes.

My natural womanly essence is out

Very nice. Did you make that? The ‘the’ on the first page should be on the top left though. Otherwise it might be read as ‘tiger the’.

Unironically great

What people that compare it to Rupi don't get is that "The Tiger" makes no reference to the author or his condition in the slightest. It's free, the poem stands on its own two feet, disconnected from petty personal problems and experiences, yet it communicates an immense, abundant amount of joy and vigor.

The cage was the tigers. And the tiger himself destroyed the cage referred to as his.
This is just beautiful.

The tiger could very much be Nael, imagining himself breaking free from the confine of society he readily recognises, even at 6.
Or if Nael is male, the cage destroyer could be him while the tiger exists as a separate concept

>The tiger could very much be Nael, imagining himself breaking free from the confine of society he readily recognises, even at 6.
Even so, Nael has hidden their emotions under a well-crafted metaphor, unlike Rupi, who just writes that she's sad and puts random line breaks in.

could we please stop comparing this to kaur? you guys dont even like her art why do you constantly bring her up

His parents had to have helped him

Most people in this thread aren't trying to diminish Nael's achievements by comparing them to Kaur. Quite the opposite, they try to diminish Kaur's achievements by comparing her to a 6-year-old child. I agree though, that it is insulting to the child, since The Tiger blows all of Kaur's body of work out of the water. I guess that her meme status causes discussion of her work appear in every single poetry thread, just like Baneposting happens in every single thread on /tv/.

This kid has talent

I always think about this masterpiece when I see this thread.
youtube.com/watch?v=Hujmlsg8k_Q
>dat primal creative energy
>LOOK AT ME
>I AM TEETH, I AM FUR

Honestly I was expecting it to suck but it actually makes you think. One can almost relate to the tiger

where do I GET THE BOOK?

There is no escaping the cage. What strikes the Tiger as "out" is just another cage that he is yet to learn to hate. The ecstasy, the cries of "Yes", remain the only real moment of the poem, albeit a tragic, hopeless one

Caught me off guard, this is actually good. Poetry isn't dead after all

seconding this

Actually I think the tiger might represent the writer in some way

He uses the same tricks as Joyce with the "yes, yes" the sneaky devil

Nael future Nobel Prize.

I just have one question. is the "yes" supposed to be what the tiger is thinking or the narrator?

damn that was really god

but who was tiger?

I unironically like it

I have the belief that this poem – this masterpiece – exists simply because ourselves in our older age and our superficial world are unable to reach such a level of pure, sincere emotion. As Fernando Pessoa pointed out, a child says "I feel like tears," an adult ('i.e. an idiot') says "I feel like crying."
This child, Nael, this legend, is the breath of an ocean air.

This kid has a command of language.

Reminder that you're not a real Naelite unless you've read the poem in its original typeset

What is the centred ‘YES’ meant to convey?

The flush left typeset is superior though.

The tiger escaping his cage. He destroys it from within and then escapes.
[Yes]
[___]YES

...damn...

All this erudite exegesis is nice and all, but is the real question to be left unanswered forever?
Does anybody have a title, at least? It looks like a children's poetry anthology. The type and the paper give it a 70s/80s look.
Wait, is that...another book?

You can see the tiger moving across the page, running towards freedom...

Its a god poem, but I hate it. It shows me just how useless and untalented I am

>not Evola as the 'tiger'

truth

The question is; who is singing a song in the rocket? Could it be a reference to Gottfried, the poor boy trapped inside Blicero's 00000 rocket in Gravity's Rainbow?

It's been published twice; once in You Will Be Able to Say a Thousand Words and then again in the Singing a Song in Their Rocket. Or the other way around.

A tiger can't destroy its cage unless it's made of like bamboo or something so I'm gonna call bullshit even though it is made by a six year old.

It's a metaphor, dumbass

For what?

The bounds of society

>t. never owned a cat

I prefer to imagine that it's some sort of super-tiger. A genetically-engineered tiger with bionic implants hopped up on experimental drugs.

Its possible that the tiger in the poem refers not to the animal, but perhaps a person. Tiger is a fairly common nickname. Perhaps young Nael is perhaps referring to Tiger Ali Singh, a WWE wrestler. Its not inconceivable that as part of a staged performances Tiger Singh escaped from some sort of cage before engaging in a brawl. Nael perhaps watched this on television and was inspired by this raw performance.

Either way the ambiguity as to what exactly the tiger is still stands. This ambiguity is why this poem speaks so deeply to us.

>yes
>YAAAAAAAAAAS

would be better

I would dare to step one foot further and juxtapose the stripes tiger invariably (regardless where it's on the gender spectrum) has with the bars cages (regardless ...) have. Stripes are far more vibrant and can be viewed as pre-colonial africa while bars represent predominantly white society that fails to twirl the way big cats do in the Cradle of Civilization. Similarly, the usage of caps lock (!) represents the dissolvement in similarity whereupon only glistening jaws of righteous discourse remain.

Tigers are from Asia

fuck that is good

youtube.com/watch?v=rObSWkQA7og

Cradle of Civilization is Mesopotamia.

>when you attend one to many social studies lecture and your brain starts forgetting the bare basics

Holy shit why is it so good and catchy?