By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World, which was published while the precocious Rich was still in her early twenties.
Rich was known for her feminist writings as well as her poetry, and this fact is relevant for an analysis of ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’, in which the speaker describes her aunt’s embroidery featuring tigers who prance proudly and unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.