Imagery

1. Imagery Feature Menu What Is Imagery? Imagery and Feelings Practice

2. What Is Imagery? An image is a representation of anything we can touch smell see taste hear

3. What Is Imagery? Imagery is language that • appeals to our five senses • creates images in our minds Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;  Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;  Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;  Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape; from “Give Me the Splendid, Silent Sun” by Walt Whitman

4. What Is Imagery? Quick Check To which senses does this passage appeal? It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit. I taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot. And after all really they’re ebony skinned: The blue’s but a mist from the breath of the wind, A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand. from “Blueberries” by Robert Frost [End of Section]

5. Imagery and Feelings Poets may use imagery to convey a feeling about their subject or to create a certain mood. • What feelings do T. S. Eliot’s images of fog evoke? The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along the level of the roofs. from “Morning at the Window” by T. S. Eliot

6. Imagery and Feelings Now read Carl Sandburg’s lines about fog. • How does the speaker of this poem feel about fog? How is that feeling different from that Eliot’s imagery creates? The fog comes on little cat feet.    It sits looking over harbor and city  on silent haunches and then moves on. from “Fog” by Carl Sandburg [End of Section]

7. Practice Think of an object or scene, and then choose a particular mood. Jot down imagery—sensory words—related to your object or scene and mood. Your notes can be raw material for a poem.

8. The End