Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
By Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer’s tigers stride across a screen
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on striding, proud and unafraid.
• The first stanza sets the setting for Aunt Jennifer’s dream world for her and her tigers (Aunt Jennifer represents all women who are caught under the oppressive hand of a
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What does she intend to illustrate? How does the poem illustrate this point/s?
•I believe she meant to illustrate a narrative of a woman, Aunt Jennifer, under the oppression of a male. This is illustrated in the 2nd stanza when Rich describes Aunt Jennifer’s hand as being too heavy to pull the needle through the wool because of the “massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band” (7, 633). This “massive weight” is man’s control over his wife and the wedding band is a symbol of his control. This idea is also supported in the third stanza when Rich describes Aunt Jennifer dead being still “ringed with the ordeals she was mastered by” (9-10, 633). Overall the poem illustrates oppression by stating in the first stanza what she really desires and then describing how she is oppressed and held back by the male in her life.
“For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is no way passive…Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate, nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is
INTRODUCTION – (1 paragraph) STRUCTURE 1. Opening sentences which introduce the poem, its author and its form.Explain why the poem is of a particular form (either a ballad or lyric poem). 2. Thesis statement: A general statement about what the poem communicates about life and life experience. 3. Signpost: briefly outline the more specific reasons for how/why the poem conveys this life experience and / or message. (Introduce the main features which will be explored in more detail in the body of your essay).
The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the
George Szirtes article “Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza, and Pattern” from the Poetry Foundation opens with opinions which focus on limitations of poetic form. As a counter to these common arguments, Szirtes claims, “Verse is not decoration: it is structural. It is a forming principle and words at depth” ("Formal Wear: Notes” 2). He then develops an argument explaining, “the constraints of form are spurs of the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination” ("Formal Wear: Notes” 2). Taking these ideas into consideration Szirtes incorporates the idea of language explaining how language connects to memory and imagination which come together to form poetic images. Additionally, when poets use form it develops
The poem begins with Aurora Leigh's observations of her aunt. "Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight/ As if for taming
The following passage is an excerpt from Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Read the passage carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze how such choices as figurative language, imagery, and dialogue develop the complex emotions the character is feeling.
Rich's tone in the poem is observant and she makes it clear that she does not want to live a life like Aunt Jennifer's. In the poem Rich makes Aunt Jennifer distinct from herself by placing Aunt Jennifer into a different generation, breaking any connection between the author and the character. Rich's writing structure in this poem contains the real life within the fantasy life. The first stanza of the poem is about the proud tigers. The second stanza is about terrified Aunt Jennifer. The third stanza refers to the continuation of the second stanza and then to the tigers. In this way, by starting the poem with the tigers and ending with the tigers, Rich is containing the real life within the fantasy, in reverse of Aunt Jennifer, whose inner life is contained within her outer life. In this poem Rich portrays what can happen to an individual who accepts the fate prescribed by custom. The overall message is that men suppress women.
Throughout the poem the author uses imagery to develop a sense of gentle love, a fondness of the beautiful story of her heritage. Using words such as, “beautiful sisters giggled and danced” and “a lanky girl trailing after her father through his Oklahoma field” and even stating “my sister and I were in love with Meema’s indian blanket.” the author generates imagery of the story she is trying to tell about her family.
Poetry, what first comes to mind? If your anything like me, poetry can seem somewhat monotonous, rather like a locked door exclusive, complicated, and hard to understand. I think poetry tends to be a big game of “Guess what I’m thinking!” and I hate that game. I’m not a mind-reader. I think a lot of people who get excited about poetry are really pretentious. This possibly comes from believing that they actually can guess what other people are thinking. When we think poetry, we tend to know poetry by it’s traditional forms of having sonnets, ballads, often rhyming (but not always) and they tend to have a specific and symmetrical structure (APA). Throughout this essay I wanted to consider poetry through different explorations and how subverting the traditional conventions of poetry might be an effective way of engagement or in an opposing way of demotivating the reader.
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poem is not merely a static, decorative creation, but that it is an act of communication between the poet and
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The stanzas are almost equal in length, and therefore the printing looks simple. This paired with the strict rhyming pattern creates a rigid structure that reflects the confinement of Aunt Jennifer in her marriage, as well as emphasises her inner freedom.