Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1951

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form & Meter

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is a short, 12-line poem written in third person. It is a lyric poem with nursery rhyme qualities in its rhyme scheme and subject matter. While the poem does not focus on the speaker’s feelings, it focuses on Aunt Jennifer’s difficulties, so the poem expresses the struggles of mid-century womanhood through this figure.

The poem is structured in three stanzas of four lines. Each stanza comprises two couplets with end rhymes or a rhyme at the end of the poetic line. The rhyme scheme of the whole poem is AABB CCDD EEFF GGHH. Most of the poem’s end rhymes are perfect rhymes, or rhymes where the sound of the stressed syllables in the word are identical. The poem’s meter is looser than the rhyme scheme; some lines are in iambic pentameter (five metrical feet of unstressed then stressed beats) or close to iambic pentameter, though there is no regular pattern to how the meter progresses.

Personification

This poem uses personification—or the attribution of human qualities to something nonhuman—to explore the relationship between a female artist and her art. Because Aunt Jennifer creates the tigers, they embody a hidden part of her personality, directly contrasting with her outward personality. She may be timid, but her tigers demonstrate her inner bravery. The character of Aunt Jennifer thus shows the complex layers of female artistry.

Specifically, Aunt Jennifer’s tigers are unbothered by men: “They do not fear the men beneath the tree” (Line 3). Her tigers are unlike real, wild tigers, who would have some fear of humans. Instead, they are similar to tigers in medieval art as they “pace in sleek chivalric certainty” (Line 4) and are symbolic figures. Like knightly heraldry, the tigers identify their creator and mark how she wants to be seen by the world. Her marriage may confine Aunt Jennifer, but her tigers “go on prancing, proud and unafraid” (Line 12) so that in her imagination, she can be free.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of similar sounds in one or more closely associated poetic lines. Along with the rhyming couplets, the alliteration gives “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” a nursery rhyme quality since the repeating sounds make the poem easy to remember. The poem comes with a cautionary message about womanhood, so Rich crafted the poem to flow musically and memorably.

Some examples of simple alliteration are in Line 5 when Aunt Jennifer’s “fingers flutter,” or on Line 12 where the tigers are “prancing and proud."

The poem also includes more complex types of alliteration, like assonance and consonance. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, and consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds. These two types of alliteration occur when the repeating sounds are not at the start of a word.

Some examples of consonance include “topaz” and “denizens” in Line 2; and “needle,” “hard,” “wedding,” and “band” in Lines 6 and 7.

“Jennifer’s tigers” is an example of assonance, where the -er sound repeats. Another example of assonance is in Line 3 with “beneath” and “tree.”