What is Imagery?

Understanding the use of imagery in poetry is essential for a comprehension of the overall meaning. Images are essentially word-pictures and they usually work by a method of association. This means that the images are created by associations that we make as readers within the linguistic context of the text. For example, the word "red" immediately creates an image or picture of the color red in our minds. This color is associated or has connotations with other feelings or images, like anger, and this increases the depth of the poem. The important thing to remember is that the images are an instrument that the poet uses to express his or her intentions or feelings. Understanding the use of images means understanding the essential meaning of the poem. Think of images as useful "tools" that the poet uses in order to reveal or explain the meaning that is in the poem For our example we will look at selected sections from Preludes by T.S. Eliot. The central theme of the poem is about the feeling of despair at the decline and decadence of modern civilization. This poem was written in 1917, when there was a worldwide critique and questioning of the values of contemporary western civilization. Due to many factors, especially the First World War and the economic depression, many artists, poets and philosophers felt that modern industrial civilization had lost its sense of meaning and direction. There was a general criticism of the status quo. Preludes falls within this ambit. In this poem, Eliot describes the modern city as a vacuum of meaning and uses imagery to intensify this feeling.

Preludes
by T.S. Eliot The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six oclock. 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. The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms

The Summer I Was Sixteen

By Geraldine Connolly The turquoise pool rose up to meet us, its slide a silver afterthought down which we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles. We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy. Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated, we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete, danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl". Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles, we came to the counter where bees staggered into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses, shared on benches beneath summer shadows. Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears, mouthing the old words, then loosened thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance through the chain link at an improbable world.

Grape Sherbet
by Rita Dove

Fishing On The Susquehanna In July

by Billy Collins

The day? Memorial. after the grill Dad appears with his masterpiece swirled snow, gelled light. We cheer. The recipe's a secret and he fights a smile, his cap turned up so the bib resembles a duck. That morning we galloped through the grassed-over mounds and named each stone for a lost milk tooth. Each dollop of sherbet, later, is a miracle, like salt on a melon that makes it sweeter. Everyone agrees - it's wonderful! It's just how we imagined lavender would taste. The diabetic grandmother stares from the porch, a torch of pure refusal. We thought no one was lying there under our feet, we thought it was a joke. I've been trying to remember the taste, but it doesn't exist. Now I see why you bothered, father.

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest. Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure -- if it is a pleasure -of fishing on the Susquehanna. I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one -a painting of a woman on the wall, a bowl of tangerines on the table -trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna. There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light. But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia, when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandana sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole. That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me. Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks, even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame.