Rich’s work “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” uses certain forms of diction, tone and meter that establish and reaffirm structure throughout the poem. The poem is written from a third-person perspective while displaying a youthful tone. The point of view in which the poem is written allows the reader to gain insight into Aunt Jennifer’s feelings and emotions. Additionally, the narrator is assumed to be an adolescent child which is established by them calling Aunt Jennifer, “Aunt Jennifer.” The tone of Rich’s poem furthermore exemplifies youthfulness; having such predominant yet simplistic rhyming couplets implies naiveté by the narrator. However, the meter, iambic pentameter, Rich uses allows the poem to have a melodious sound and flow gracefully from
The way that the poem rhymes affect the way it sound buy giving it a certain beat and
In the poem, the mother takes her daughter to a pool party composed of boys. The speaker watches the children dive into the pool and imagines her daughter working math problems to calculate the gallons of water. As she watches the young girl climb out of the pool in her hamburger and french fry print swimming suit, she notes that the other young girls are looking at the boys, and as well as her daughter, she is beginning to recognize the appeal of their masculinity. The language of the poem is associated with the childness of the young girl. The description the speaker gives of the girl leads the reader to believe she is a child. She calls her “my girl,” and describes her of having a sweet face and a sleek ponytail. “She will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will see her sweet face” (1115), the diction of Olds word choice demonstrates the innocence of a young child beginning to approach maturity. She provides detailed portrayal of the character to provide the reader with an image of the diminishing childhood innocence of the
This is a very lyrical poem. The speaker's emotions and intentions are made very clear in very inconspicuous ways. The subtle repetition of certain words and images give the poem a very distinct tone. For example, the repetition of the words
Rich's tone in the poem is observant and she makes it clear that she does not want to live a life like Aunt Jennifer's. In the poem Rich makes Aunt Jennifer distinct from herself by placing Aunt Jennifer into a different generation, breaking any connection between the author and the character. Rich's writing structure in this poem contains the real life within the fantasy life. The first stanza of the poem is about the proud tigers. The second stanza is about terrified Aunt Jennifer. The third stanza refers to the continuation of the second stanza and then to the tigers. In this way, by starting the poem with the tigers and ending with the tigers, Rich is containing the real life within the fantasy, in reverse of Aunt Jennifer, whose inner life is contained within her outer life. In this poem Rich portrays what can happen to an individual who accepts the fate prescribed by custom. The overall message is that men suppress women.
He uses this in the poem to give it rhythm to engage the reader and
The tone of this poem is established by the way the lines seem flat and void of emotion. The
symbolic richness, but at the same time the poem supplies the reader with a wide
As for the meter, it reminds Iambic Pentameter. Though, the conventional rhythm is broken by the author’s punctuation (exclamation points and commas as well as periods and dashes). Due to this device the poem comes closer to prose and sounds conversational. It was probably used to avoid song music mood and to give as much contrast as possible to the heroic poems of other authors like Richard Lovelace. If in Lovelace’s case the poem is to inspire the reader, in Owen’s work the rhythm is like a war, like death itself – hard, stumbling, hopeless, fumbling, and full of suffer. The reader suffers while overcoming all those hyphens and points inside lines. In this way, the two poems are on the opposite sides by their inner and outer sense.
The most visually noticeable part of this poem is the format. It isn’t written in familiar stanzas with any kind of meter or complex
has lots of tone. Tone is the attitude of a poem but not only just the attitude but also the
The poem does not follow a rhyme scheme or meter, which means that there is rhythm in the poem and it makes the poem more like a song. The poem has four stanza’s and has five lines within each stanza.
The poem starts off brilliantly. “The first four lines are beautifully phrased, and the opening couplet in particular has ingrained itself in the collective consciousness” (Blair, 1). “She walks in beauty, like the night/ Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/ And all
Just as denotation and connotation are used for words like “home,” this device is also used in the poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” to prove the underlying message of domestic abuse or violence. When the author uses words like, “prancing” in line twelve the
The poem is separated into two parts, each with sixteen lines, and is loosely based on an iambic pentameter metre. The rhyme scheme is ABAB throughout the poem, with the noticeable exception of the last four lines of part II, in which it changes to