Poem Analysis: Aunt Jennifer's Tigers by Adrienne Rich

The poem I am going to talk about is “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” by ADRIENNE RICH. When I saw the title of the poem, the first thing we can know is the speaker had an aunt named Jennifer. Also, I thought real tigers would be describing in the poem, and I wondered how could a woman rear some tigers. But after I saw the first line of the poem, I found out the tigers in the poem were not real. In the first stanza, we can see the speaker used the word “prance” to describe the move of the tigers, it made me imagine some happy and chill tigers. In line3 and 4, we can conclude the tigers are brave, sleek and stately. In the second stanza, the speaker began to talk about aunt Jennifer. We realize she was doing some arts, but she was not doing that easily, on the contrary, it's hard for her to pull the needle through the wool that makes the tapestry. So, we have her at work sewing something, but she's not very certain of her work and it seems to be giving her difficulty. We have a really distinct contrast, then, between Aunt Jennifer's tigers, who are brave and stately, and Aunt Jennifer herself, who struggles with her craft. We know that the she is being weighed down by her wedding band from her husband, called "Uncle" by the poem. It seems that it was not a happy marriage. I think the tigers are representations of all the qualities that she herself wanted to have, but couldn't. Even if she was unsatisfied by her marriage, she found a life for herself in her art.