Stanley Gardner observes that after "he had written the first draft of 'The Tyger', Blake added what is now stanza 5 as an incomparable afterthought, and in doing so extended the intellectual challenge of the poem by drawing Innocence into the argument. Without stanza 5 the reader is faced with the proposition that the 'endless labyrinth of woe', in which mankind is trapped as an immemorial victim, can be cleared only by a controlled and furious revolt, which is both physically determined and spiritually fired. This in itself would have been poetry enough. The additional lines extend the argument through the paradox: that what needs a divinely tempered physical endeavour for its achieving now, has already been achieved by true pity. To say this, Blake has to take on the risk of what he says being misunderstood for a philosophical commonplace; but the risk is diminished by the power of the lines that proceed it, and is dispelled as the imagination engages the problem of those stars and 'their spears'" (155).