English III
Mrs. Tassey
Examples of Imagery
Sight Imagery (when you read the words, you get a picture in your head)
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The crimson liquid spilled from the neck of the white dove, staining and matting its pure, white feathers.
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The shadows crisscrossed the rug while my cat stretched languidly in one of the patches of sun.
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For the life of him, he couldn't figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the
colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange.
But never licorice, which, to him, was real black. (excerpt from Maniac Magee)
Sound Imagery (when you read the words, you can hear the sounds that the words describe)
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"....Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box"
(From 'An Old Man’s Winter Night' by Robert Frost)
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"At the next table a woman stuck her nose in a novel; a college kid pecked at a laptop. Overlaying all this, a soundtrack: chook-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k--the metronomic rhythm of an Amtrak train rolling down the line to California, a sound that
called to mind an old camera reel moving frames of images along a linear track, telling a story." (excerpt from 'Riding the
Rails')
Smell Imagery (when you read the words, you can smell what the words describe)
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"I was awakened by the strong smell of a freshly brewed coffee."
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"John's socks, still soaked with sweat from Tuesday's P.E. class, filled the classroom with an aroma akin to that of salty, weekold, rotting fish"
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"I lay still and took another minute to smell: I smelled the warm, sweet, all-pervasive smell of silage, as well as the sour dirty
laundry spilling over the basket in the hall. I could pick out the acrid smell of Claire's drenched diaper, her sweaty feet, and her
hair crusted with sand. The heat compounded the smells, doubled the fragrance."
(excerpt from "A Map of the World", Random House)
Touch Imagery (when you read the words, you can feel what the words describe- hot, cold, smooth, rough…)
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'The bed linens might just as well be ice and the clothes snow.' From Robert Frost's "The Witch of Coos"
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"When the others went swimming my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had
hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little
body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled
the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death." From E.B.White's, 'One More To The Lake'
Taste Imagery (when you read the words, you can recall the flavors being described)
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"Tumbling through the ocean water after being overtaken by the monstrous wave, Mark unintentionally took a gulp of the
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briny, bitter mass, causing him to cough and gag."
The sweet marinara sauce makes up for the bland sea-shell pasta that Jeffrey served.