Imagery (poetry)

Definitions:

• When a writer uses descriptive language to paint a picture in the reader’s head.

• The use of vivid or figurative language to represent objects, actions, or ideas.

Imagery intensifies the impact of the writer’s words as he shows us rather than tells us.

This is an excerpt from “Preludes” by T. S. Eliot. You can almost see and hear the horse steaming and stamping and smell the steaks.

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

Next is an excerpt from "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth. The first and last stanzas that show a progression of the poet’s emotions.

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.

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.

The last of the examples of imagery poems is an excerpt is from “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes:

O thou,Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave,until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!