Aunt Jennifer's Tigers Literary Elements

The action in the poem is told from the perspective of a third-person objective point of view. Because the poem refers to Jennifer as "Aunt Jennifer," we can infer that the speaker is Jennifer's niece.

The poem is written in loose iambic pentameter—lines of ten syllables alternating between stressed and unstressed syllables. Each stanza follows an AABB rhyme scheme.

In the third stanza, Rich uses the word "ringed" metaphorically, to describe being enclosed or imprisoned. However, she also draws on the literal meaning of the word, through the connection between Jennifer's lack of freedom as a married woman, and her wedding ring.

In line 4, the phrase "sleek chivalric certainty" alliterates the /s/ sound.

In lines 11-12, "The tigers in the panel that she made/Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid," the /p/ sound is alliterated.

The poem centers around the situational irony of Aunt Jennifer embroidering an image of "proud and unafraid" tigers while she is weak and terrified. This irony is heightened by fact that embroidery is a craft heavily associated with traditional womanhood.

Feminist poetry

Aunt Jennifer's house

Aggrieved, observant.

The protagonist is Aunt Jennifer, the antagonist is her husband and her marriage.

The major conflict is between Aunt Jennifer's human desire for freedom, and her position in life which confines her and keeps her afraid.

The climax of the poem occurs in the third stanza, where the contrast between Aunt Jennifer and the tigers reaches its most extreme point in the difference between her meek death and their proud immortality.

In the first stanza, Rich writes that the tigers "do not fear the men beneath the tree," foreshadowing Aunt Jennifer's fear of her husband.

The poem alludes to Blake's poem "The Tyger," which describes a "bright" tiger in a forest. Jennifer's gemlike tigers in a world of green call up this famous image. "The Tyger" ends by asking "What immortal hand or eye,/dare frame thy fearful symmetry"—in other words, who would be brave enough to create an animal as strange and terrifying as the tiger? Here, Rich answers that question in a surprising way—it is the terrified hand of a mortal woman who creates the proud and fearless tiger.

Synecdoche: Aunt Jennifer's wedding ring stands in for her marriage as a whole.

Rich uses hyperbole when she refers to "the massive weight of Uncle's wedding band," wildly exaggerating the physical weight of the object in order to emphasize its spiritual weight on Aunt Jennifer's life.