Imagery in Poetry

Imagery comes in a few flavors: figurative language, metaphor, simile, personification, allusion, and then sound techniques (alliteration, assonance, consonance, cacophony, euphony, onomatopoeia, rhyme). These techniques help create sound and sight in a poem (two of our most important senses). Using diction, a poet can also recall senses of smell, touch, and taste, but these are harder to do. Here's an example:   

Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

The reason poets rely so heavily on metaphor and simile as the common currency of poetry is that it relates to imagery. Metaphor and simile say with pictures and specific objects what abstract nouns cannot. They help clarify, focus, and bring an image to the foreground of a poem. This is necessary to communicate an idea.

"Metaphors set up precise identities between two halves of a comparison" - Ted Kooser

However, we don't want our comparisons to be either A). too obscure and difficult to understand or B). too obvious (bordering on cliche).

Its a fine strand of web the poet scuttles across to anchor two dissimilar points of space. When working with metaphor and figurative language in your own poems consider the relationship between the subject and the object (or setting, event, etc.) The most beautiful metaphors/similes are subtle ones that are both fresh and new, while also being familiar.

Pick words (particularly verbs and adjectives) that correspond to the main metaphor/simile working in your poem. This helps to create tone as well as picture the subject in an effective way. Try to extend your metaphors through at least a stanza, if not the entire poem.

Example:
Martin Walls' poem "Snail" is about a snail. There are a series of "snail-appropriate words found in the poem"

Snail
It is a flattened shell the color of spoiled milk, a bold
Swirl slowly stirred that charts the age of what's
Curled inside with the tension of a watch spring. A creature
That embodies the history of metaphysics: first it exists,
Then it doesn't, then it emerges once again, unrolls
One, then another, eyestalk, like periscopes breaking
The surface of its wet-life. And here's the tongue body
The petal-body, molding its shape to the world's shape.

The snail is compared to: spoiled milk, a horoscope, a watch spring, periscope, flowers, tongue, and the world. By writing about a snail, we consider it in its proper function as a comparison/contrast to other life, particularly ours. If a snail has purpose, then so do we.

Spoiled milk gives us a negative image, but the words bold, stirred, and curled (curdled) all seem appropriate word choices for the comparison. The snail furthermore encompasses the world in an orderly way. It is both a watch spring (human made and intelligently designed) indicating the spiral shape of a snail shell, but also a tongue (natural object) that goes along with wet and unrolls.

All in all there are snail words: eyestalk, swirl (the shell), shell, slow.
It moves slowly, and the pace of the poem is also slow: words like slowly, emerge, unrolls, molds (also connected to the smell in the first line as a double meaning), recall the movement of a snail, leaving a wet slime trail behind it. This disgusting invertebrate is compared to the function of the world--giving this little animal a metaphysical meaning that compares its life with ours.

Note that this is a small poem. It doesn't function as a grandiose political idea or earth-shattering observation. It compares (metaphor/simile) us and our human made world to its natural world linking us with nature, reminding us of our own value and worth. Sometimes that's all that's needed.

Imagery is usually broken down into the five senses, but can also include temperature and the sense of pain. Here's a web page that you might find helpful. Check it out!

Let's decipher one of these poems as a reader & writer. Elizabeth Bishop's narrative poem In the Waiting Room.

CLASSWORK:
Spend your time in the lab today to read more examples of poems. Here are a bunch of Robert Frost poems. He was an expert at imagery and sound. He often writes about nature and, of course, death. Pay this in mind when reading his poetry as it will help you understand it. Check out this web page for examples of Robert Frost's poems.

Here are some other famous poems. Please read them and open your mind. Pay attention to how talented writers write and craft their poems by applying the knowledge you have learned about poetry to noticing how each poet creates an effective poem using devices like sound, line, meter, tone, persona, theme, diction, etc. For today's task, you may work with a partner. FOR EACH POEM, please analyze and write 3-10 sentences about what you found in the poem by identifying any of the following: SOUND devices (alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, rhyme), DICTION (tone, mood, voice, etc.), LINE (meter, enjambment, rhyme, stanza form), IMAGERY (metaphor, simile, personification, allusion, figurative language).

My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke  

 MY PAPA'S WALTZ
 
  The whiskey on your breath
  Could make a small boy dizzy;
  But I hung on like death:
  Such waltzing was not easy.
 
  We romped until the pans
  Slid from the kitchen shelf;
  My mother's countenance
  Could not unfrown itself.
 
  The hand that held my wrist
  Was battered on one knuckle;
  At every step you missed
  My right ear scraped a buckle.
  
  You beat time on my head
  With a palm caked hard by dirt,
  Then waltzed me off to bed 
  Still clinging to your shirt.

From: The Eve of Saint Agnes by John Keats 

I.   ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told	5
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Preludes by T.S. Eliot

I 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	5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,	10
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer	15
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,	20
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms. WRITING TASK: After reading and analyzing the poems above with your partner, go back to your own computer and collect ALL your poems you wrote for exercises in MODULE 1. Print out each poem and call these draft 1. THEN: after printing your work, go back through your written poems and add imagery, sound devices, fix diction, add tone, create line and meter patterns, and/or REVISE your work. Call these poems draft 2. HOMEWORK: None.