The Power of Imagery in Poetry: Engaging the Senses

1. 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

2. 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.

3. Imagery • Visual imagery • Auditory imagery • Tactile imagery

4. 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.`

5. 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;

6. Auditory imagery • Auditory imagery is fairly frequently used by a poet • It may be produced by the naming and describing of sounds

7. 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….

8. 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

9. 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…..