Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is a short, 12-line poem written in third person. It is a lyric poem with nursery rhyme qualities in its rhyme scheme and subject matter. While the poem does not focus on the speaker’s feelings, it focuses on Aunt Jennifer’s difficulties, so the poem expresses the struggles of mid-century womanhood through this figure.

The poem is structured in three stanzas of four lines. Each stanza comprises two couplets with end rhymes or a rhyme at the end of the poetic line. The rhyme scheme of the whole poem is AABB CCDD EEFF GGHH. Most of the poem’s end rhymes are perfect rhymes, or rhymes where the sound of the stressed syllables in the word are identical. The poem’s meter is looser than the rhyme scheme; some lines are in iambic pentameter (five metrical feet of unstressed then stressed beats) or close to iambic pentameter, though there is no regular pattern to how the meter progresses.

This poem uses personification—or the attribution of human qualities to something nonhuman—to explore the relationship between a female artist and her art. Because Aunt Jennifer creates the