IMAGERY ANALYSIS OPTIONS
STUDENT OPTION #2
STUDENT OPTION #1
“I wandered lonely as a cloud” by William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Source: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/11_16/poetry/growing_up.shtml
Then out of the harbour,
With that three-cornered fin
Shearing without a bubble the water
Lithely,
Leisurely,
He swam—
That strange fish,
Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue,
He seemed to know the harbour,
So leisurely he swam;
His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge,
Stirred not a bubble
As it moved
With its base-line on the water.
STUDENT OPTION #4
“The Shark” by Edwin John Pratt
Look it up!
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
we trekked and picked until the cans were full,
until the tinkling bottom had been covered
with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue,
And as he passed the wharf
He turned,
And snapped at a flat-fish
That was dead and floating.
And I saw the flash of a white throat,
And a double row of white teeth,
And eyes of metallic grey,
Hard and narrow and slit.
STUDENT OPTION #3
“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
“Blackberry Picking” by Seamus Heaney
IMAGERY RESPONSE EXAMPLE
Prompt: Choose one poem with vivid imagery. Explain what images the poet uses, and what effect those images have
on the reader and the meaning of the poem. Use textual evidence to support your claims.
Sample Student
Ms. Schonhar
English I
15 April 2014
Juxtaposed Innocence and Evil: Imagery in “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers”
In “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” Margaret Atwood juxtaposes innocent and deadly images to convey
the idea that growing up around war can create a sense of guilt in bystanders. In the first stanza, Atwood juxtaposes an
image of the speaker playing innocently with corpses being buried, most likely during the Holocaust: “While I was
building neat/ castles in the sandbox,/ the hasty pits were/ filling with bulldozed corpses” (ll. 1-4). The reader is
immediately jarred by the vastly different visual images. Next, the speaker narrates, “and as I walked to the school/
washed and combed, my feet/ stepping on the cracks in the cement/ detonated red bombs” (ll. 5-8). The narrator has
grown and is still surrounded by war, but now he/she is a more direct participant, actually stepping on cracks to cause
bombs to explode. Finally, the speaker describes his/her adult self as a bomb when he/she says, “I sit in my chair/ as
quietly as a fuse” (ll. 10-11). The speaker is now the actual agent of violence instead of the more innocent child. By
juxtaposing progressively more active images of the speaker with violence, the poet depicts the speaker as a more
aware and responsible agent of violence in her passivity in simply reading newspapers.