Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

The poem opens with the introduction of the tigers by an unnamed third-person speaker who observes the scene. As the poem’s title and first line imply, these tigers belong to a character named Aunt Jennifer. This is an unusual image because people rarely own or have access to animals as wild and dangerous tigers. These tigers also “prance across a screen” (Line 1), so the reader quickly learns that the tigers are synthetic; and, by the poem’s second line, the narrative takes on a quietly humorous tone as the speaker terms the tigers “denizens” (Line 2). Though the tigers move freely, their movements are springy and ostentatious unlike the prowling gait of actual tigers. Even their colors are exaggerated jewel tones like the yellow-orange of topaz: “[b]right topaz denizens of a world of green” (Line 2). In this green world—created particularly for them—the tigers are free from the concerns of real tigers in the wild. As the speaker observes these things, the poem’s tone is characterized by lighthearted curiosity and the joyfully willing suspension of disbelief.

The first stanza, with all its brightness, shows this “world of green” (Line 2) as almost Edenic. The tigers’ “prancing” (Line 1) expresses a playful bravado, while the world’s greenness exudes an archetypal fullness of life. Moreover, unlike real tigers, who are wary of people, these tigers “do not fear the men beneath the tree” who would usually present danger to wildlife (Line 3). The men, too, since they sit nearby, are presumably unafraid of the tigers; the tigers and the men encounter each other as equals. This counterintuitive harmony further instills a sense of fiction—both a fantastical whimsy and the prelapsarian communion of a newly created world, with Aunt Jennifer as the implicit divine creator. In this space, the tigers can move about in “sleek chivalric certainty” (Line 4) or live healthfully both physically and mentally; they thrive in their green world. By adopting the human idea of chivalry—or knightly manners—for themselves, the tigers get their own agency and claim a trait usually applied to men. This lofty humanizing nobility adds another subtle comic touch to the poem and accentuates that everything in this little cosmos leans toward beneficence. The presence of the medieval virtue also imparts a dual sense of nostalgia and timelessness.

The second stanza presents a shift in tone from lighthearted to more thoughtful when, in contrast to her tigers, Aunt Jennifer appears somewhat disempowered, even as she is revealed as the tigers’ creator. Just as the poem’s main ideas emerge layer by layer, Aunt Jennifer constructs her tigers’ scene thread by thread, then row by row: She makes the tigers by working at a loom, her fingers “fluttering through her wool” (Line 5). The verb “fluttering” (Line 5) is semi-ambiguous; the word often describes light, quick motions, but the next three lines immediately preclude this meaning, as Aunt Jennifer’s fingers are encumbered by the “massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band” (Line 7); “fluttering” (Line 5) thus communicates uncertainty and trembling, even weariness. Though the speaker omits an explicit description of the ring, the “massive weight” (Line 7) creates an image of thick gold and heavy jewels, suggesting that Aunt Jennifer’s husband is a wealthy man who prefers that his wife remain at home with her sewing work. In this case, the ring “sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand” (Line 8) both literally and figuratively: The band not only hinders her creativity but enforces her conventional role as a wife confined to the domestic sphere.

With the third stanza, the tone deepens in thoughtfulness to something more somber as the speaker considers what will happen to Aunt Jennifer, since she will likely remain weighed down by her marital role for the rest of her life. The speaker imagines that Aunt Jennifer’s working hands will only be stopped by death: “When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie” (Line 9). Here Rich adds a twist to the word lie. On a literal level, the hands will lie still in her coffin—but the heavy ring creates a lie, or falsehood, about her talent. The ring marks her as a wife, while her hands crave an artistic identity. The third stanza’s first line also describes her hands as “terrified” (Line 9), which further illuminates the verb “fluttering” (Line 5) to suggest Aunt Jennifer’s fingers tremble from not only fatigue but fear (a fear possibly regarding her husband).

Nevertheless, Aunt Jennifer may have “terrified hands” (Line 9) that reveal an outward anxiety, but the artwork made by these hands exhibits emotional and imaginative strength. As the speaker imagines her aunt’s death, the woman who possessed these hands “still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by” (Line 10) fought in her own way. Though she was “mastered” by unnamed “ordeals” as a devoted wife in a society that demanded extensive female subservience, she found her own ways to escape and assert her own creative power and agency.

Like many oppressed women, Aunt Jennifer makes this escape in her art. She creates a world of freedom for her tigers who will outlive even their creator. The poem’s last two lines present a final shift in tone from somberness to a quiet resolution to match the “certainty” (Line 4) of the tigers themselves: “The tigers in the panel that she made / Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid” (Lines 11-12). These mythic tigers represent Aunt Jennifer’s true being, and they convey how others will remember her through her artwork: not as a timid wife, but as a woman with a vibrant inner life as fearless as her tigers. The poem’s conclusion gives the tapestry’s elements a retrospective significance: While the tigers’ chivalry is a traditionally masculine trait, Aunt Jennifer harbors this reality within herself and so claims a power traditionally reserved for men. Moreover, the tigers “do not fear the men” (Line 3); this reveals Aunt Jennifer’s innermost spirit as a woman who knows she is not truly inferior to men but rather subjugated by them. The poem ultimately portrays creativity as a source of truth and liberation, and the speaker carries this memory of Aunt Jennifer forward to the reader so that they may view the tapestry—and its full meaning—long after both speaker and aunt are dead.