On Aunt Jennifer\'s Tigers

My breeding of the numbers, however, is that the numbers resists those oppositions upon which Popes and Byars criticisms depend. I would argue that aunty Jennifers Tigers does non distributor point a combat betwixt the undivided and the companionable, but kind of characterizes them by their interdependence. (The person-to-person in this poem is deeply concerned in the policy-making, and misdeed versa.) In the aboriginal symbols of the poem--the arras tigers and the Uncles marriage stack--the exclusive and social, the own(prenominal) and the political proper. The tapestry tigers be not just individual artistic human faces; they are politically inflected, prosecute in hoary chivalry myths (as Byars argues), and--as icons of colonialism (I would add)--suggestive of capitalist regimes of power (notice overly they are sewed with an bead needle. The in-person and the political once again meet in the intimacy of Uncles unify doughnut. By the strong-arm intima cy of a marriage ceremony band and by the familial presence conferred by *Uncles* wedding band (emphasis added), auntie Jennifers Tigers individual(prenominal)izes the presence of antiquated politics. \nThe poems social structure also carrys the personal into the political and the political into the personal. The parallel syntactic structures of rhythms one and devil suggest the relatedness of their content. twain follow the pull auntie Jennifers, with rhyme dickens substituting tigers prance crossways the screen ( bankers bill 1) with the mistakable sounding fingers fleet though her wool. The function of color in the second lines of all(prenominal) indite--topaz and green and ivory (line 6)-and the presence of men in the trey lines-the men at a lower place the tree (line 3) and Uncles wedding band (line 7) live in the stanzas parallelisms. These parallelisms draw associations betwixt the images described. owe to such parallelisms, the operose fingers of the second indite resonate with the prompt tigers of inaugural verse. practice session the second stanza ski binding to the first, the weight that sits hard upon Aunt Jennifers fleet of its final exam exam line (line 8) lends sobriety to the dauntless certainty of the final line of the first stanza. Though verse one nominally describes artistic freedom, and verse two nominally describes patriarchal power, the geomorphological affinities between the two verses resist the inflexible binarizing of rebellion and repression. The final verse of the poem persists in this destabilisation as hither rebellion and repression meet in the simultaneity of the fearless tigers and the lifeless aunt: When Aunt is dead, her terrified work force will dwell Still circinate with ordeals she was mastered by. \nThe tigers in the panel that she make Will go on prancing, elevated and unafraid. To condemn Aunt Jennifers Tigers then, as Byars does, for its rebellions responsibility to patriarch al farming is, I would argue, to neglect the point. What makes the poem interesting, I think, is the very interplay between rebellion and repression, between the individual and the social, between the personal and the political. To read a proclamation wherein individual expression wholly escapes the social/political, magically advance above patriarchal discourse, seems to me a to the lowest degree a slight naive and by and large dismissive of the poems more than sophisticated conceptuality of power. \n