Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is a poem from Adrienne Rich’s first volume of poetry, A Change of World (1951), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award upon publication. This book launched Rich’s long and prestigious career as a poet, essayist, and activist. Formally controlled and vibrant with meaningful imagery, the poem stands in Rich’s literary oeuvre as an early example of her talent. It shows the influence of W. H. Auden, who selected the poem for the Younger Poets Award. Themes that dominate her work, like sexuality and marriage, appear in this poem; even at this early stage in her career, Rich lays out her observations on the uneasy weight of womanhood and gender expectations in America. The poem is a short lyric poem with an omniscient speaker who watches their Aunt Jennifer weave a tapestry. The poem’s imagery of weaving, ornate jewelry, and chivalry nods to medieval tropes of womanhood, but “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is set firmly in the mid-20th century. Rich applies these images to critique her society’s strict gender roles. The poem exhibits the feminist ideals that defined Rich’s work in the 1960s and 70s.

Poet Biography

Adrienne Rich was born in May 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, to Arnold and Helen Rich. Her father worked at Johns Hopkins University and became the chairman of pathology in 1940; her mother was a concert pianist and composer. Though raised Christian, Rich’s father was ethnically Jewish and tried to hide this side of his identity from his colleagues; Rich later wrote about how this confusion sparked her challenges with identity.

Rich attended Radcliffe College and excelled as a writer and poet. Her poetic career launched when she was 22 and won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, which has published the debut collections of promising young American writers since 1919. Yale published her book A Change of World in 1951. Rich then won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year but left to travel and write on the continent.

On her return to the United States in 1953, she married Alfred Haskell Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard. They had three sons together. Rich continued to publish poetry and won another Guggenheim Fellowship to translate Dutch poetry in 1960.

Her husband left Harvard in 1966 to teach at City College of New York, and this move to New York City in the mid-1960s allowed both Conrad and Rich to get more involved with social movements. Rich joined the New Left and became involved in civil rights, anti-war and feminist activism; as her poetry matured, it tackled these social issues head-on and broke from her usual formal style. She disseminated her views from 1967-69 by lecturing at Swarthmore College and teaching at Columbia University.

Rich and her husband opened up their marriage in the late 1960s. Around this time, Rich came out as a lesbian and started writing essays in the radical feminist discourse. Her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980) is widely read in gender studies classes; while some of the essay’s arguments remain relevant into the early 21st century, Rich held an essentialist feminist view on sex and gender that is now widely considered by scholars to be outdated.

Conrad died by suicide in 1970. While Rich had separated from her husband at the time of his death, his suicide’s impact resonated in her writing for the next decade.

Rich’s most famous volume of poetry—Diving into the Wreck—co-won the National Book Award in 1974 with a book by Allen Ginsberg. She refused to accept the award individually and instead accepted it with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of all women.

In 1976, Rich moved in with her long-term partner and fellow writer, Michelle Cliff, and they remained together for the rest of her life. They eventually settled in Santa Cruz, California but maintained academic positions on the East and West Coasts throughout the 1980s and 90s. Later in her career, Rich strived to connect with her Jewish identity; she helped found and served as editor for Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends. She won the MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1994 for her writing and poetry. In 1997, she refused the National Medal of the Arts from the Clinton administration based on political differences.

Rich continued to write prolifically, grow as an LGBTQ icon, and protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until her death from rheumatoid arthritis in 2012.

Poem Text

Rich, Adrienne. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” 1951. A Change of World: Poems.

Summary

The three-stanza poem opens with a third-person speaker—of unknown age but presumably the niece or nephew of the titular Aunt Jennifer—observing their aunt’s tigers “prance across a screen” (Line 1). It is initially unclear which kind of screen Aunt Jennifer’s tigers are prancing across—television, film, or something else—and this adds some cinematic suspense. The tigers are “denizens” (Line 2) of a technicolor world, where their “topaz” (Line 2) color stands out against the green background. The wild tigers are peaceful and do not “fear the men” (Line 3) beneath a nearby tree; these tigers are valiant or “chivalric” (Line 4) and sure of themselves.

The next stanza clarifies why the tigers belong to Aunt Jennifer: She is a skilled weaver. The “screen” (Line 1) is actually a tapestry that she creates from wool with deft hands and an “ivory needle” (Line 6). However, Aunt Jennifer struggles to complete her expert work because her wedding ring weighs down her fingers, holding back her dexterity.

The final stanza laments what will happen after Aunt Jennifer passes away. After death, the heavy ring will remain on her finger; the speaker states explicitly that this ring represents Aunt Jennifer’s confining marriage, referring to the ring as “the ordeals [Aunt Jennifer] was mastered by” (Line 10). However, says the speaker, the tigers will live on, “prancing, proud and unafraid” (Line 12).