Imagery
• A poem has its power to produce in the mind an
effect very nearly the same as that created by
stimulation of the sensory organs.
• Each line of a poem contains an image, which ,
like a picture, may take the place of a thousand
words
• Though the term images suggests a thing seen,
when speaking of images we generally mean a
word or sequence of words that refers to any
sensory experience
Imagery
An image may occur in a single word, a
phrase, a sentence, or in this case, an
entire short poem.
To speak of the imagery of a poem—all its
images taken together—is often more
useful than to speak of separate images.
Imagery
• Visual imagery
• Auditory imagery
• Tactile imagery
Visual Imagery
• We speak of mental pictures; we mean an
effect in the mind much like that produced
by our perceiving a visible object through
the eye, the optic nerve, and the
appropriate regions of the brain.`
Example of visual imagery in a
poem
from The Eve of St.Agnes
A casement high and triple-arched there was
All garland with carven imag’ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass
And diamonded with panes of quaint device
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings;
Auditory imagery
• Auditory imagery is fairly frequently used
by a poet
• It may be produced by the naming and
describing of sounds
Example of auditory imagery
• John Keats reinforces auditory imagery by
imitating natural sounds in the sounds of his
words:
The silver,snarling trumpets’ gan to chide…
…meantime the frost-wind blows
Like love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes….
Tactile imagery
• Poetry also appeals the sense of feeling
that produce tactile images.
• Tactile imagery refers to images produced
bye sense of feeling from the words in
poem that deals with a touch (as a
perception of roughness or smoothness)
• It may be an odor or a taste or perhaps a
bodily sensation such as pain, the
quenching of thirst etc
Example of tactile imagery
• These lines from another stanza of “The
Eve of St. Agnes” contain images
appealing to what we closely call the
sense of feeling:
Soon trembling in her soft and chilly-nest
In sort of wakeful swoon, preplexed she lay
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued
away…..