Close Read Draft: Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” TK SEO HED

Poems don’t have to be perfect, but this one pretty much is. I mean that less as praise — though it is a long-time favorite — than as a technical description. Not many modern verses are so finely wrought, so ruthlessly precise in every facet of meaning and music.

It was included in her first book, “A Change of World,” published in 1951, the year she graduated. W.H. Auden wrote an avuncular foreword, praising Rich’s work as “neatly and modestly dressed.” These poems “speak quietly but do not mumble,” he wrote, “respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.”

The condescension is galling, and it also severely understates Rich’s virtuosity and her commitment to honesty. But she eventually came to regard her writing from the 1950s and ’60s with ambivalence, finding it too obedient to the social and literary strictures of its time. Later, she would move away from the formal decorum and rhetorical restraint of that early work, a change she regarded as liberatory and connected with her embrace of feminism and radical politics.

Looking back at her first poems (including this one), she likened their careful rhymes and regular meters to “asbestos gloves” insulating her from “materials I couldn’t pick up barehanded.”

“It was important to me,” she wrote in 1971, “that Aunt Jennifer was a person as distinct from myself as possible — distanced by the formalism of the poem, by its objective, observant tone — even by putting the woman in a different generation.”

Aunt Jennifer is not a picture drawn from life. Her tigers are similarly invented — creatures of her imagination and her skilled, nervous fingers.

The analogy isn’t exact, but in each case the artist, Aunt Jennifer or Adrienne Rich, conjures something that appears to be her antithesis but that may turn out to be her mirror image. “I thought I was creating a portrait of an imaginary woman,” Rich would write. Only later did she notice the resemblance between the aging seamstress and “the girl who wrote poems,” who was similarly defined “by her relationships with men.”

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers can do as they please. They never stop moving.

Like “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.”