Famous Examples of Imagery in Shakespearean Works
Organic: appeals to and communicates internal sensations, feelings, and emotions, such as fatigue, thirst, fear, love, loneliness, despair, etc. Kinesthetic: appeals to a reader’s sense of motion or movement through describing the sensations of moving or the movements of an object. Olfactory: appeals to the sense of smell by describing something’s fragrance or odor. Tactile: appeals to the sense of touch by describing how something physically feels, such as its temperature, texture, or other sensation. Gustatory: appeals to the sense of taste by describing whether something is sweet, salty, savory, spicy, or sour. Auditory: appeals to the sense of hearing or sound by including melodic sounds, silence, harsh noises, and even onomatopoeia. Visual: appeals to the sense of sight through the description of color, light, size, pattern, etc. Here are the main types of poetic imagery: This appeals to a reader’s imagination and emotions as well as their senses. Overall, poetic imagery provides sensory details to create clear and vibrant descriptions. These types of imagery often feature figures of speech such as similes and metaphors to make comparisons. Yeats’ poem “Leda and the Swan” begins with kinesthetic imagery: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl.” In this line, the reader sees the movement of a bird’s wings and the disorientation of a girl.For poetic imagery, there are seven primary types. Kinesthetic imagery describes the sense of movement, and it could refer to the movement of the speaker or objects around the speaker of the poem. In Frost's poem “Birches,” he describes feelings of fatigue and aimlessness in the line, “It’s when I’m weary of considerations, / And life is too much like a pathless wood.” Perceiving Motion and Energy These feelings could be emotions such as love or despair, or they could be sensations like hunger or thirst. Sensing Internal EmotionsĪccording to Friends of Robert Frost, organic imagery describes internal sensations, or things the speaker of the poem feels. Longfellow writes, “They silently inhale / the clover-scented gale, / And the vapors that arise / From the well-watered and smoking soil” in his poem “Rain in Summer.” These words paint a clear picture in the reader’s mind about smells the speaker experiences after rainfall. Poets can also appeal to the sense of smell through the use of olfactory imagery. In his poem “Romance Sonambulo,” Federico Garcia Lorca writes, “The stiff wind left / in their mouths, a strange taste / of bile, of mint, and of basil.” This taste profile correlates with Garcia Lorca’s frequent mention of the color green throughout the poem. Poets appeal to this sense by explaining what something tastes like, which can be particularly effective if the description is something the reader is familiar with. Imagery describing taste sensations is also referred to as gustatory imagery. The line “And kneeled and made the cheerless grate / Blaze up, and all the cottage warm ” in Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover” uses tactile imagery to describe the warmth of the cottage. This type of imagery might define characteristics like hardness, softness, wetness, heat or cold, according to Friends of Robert Frost. Feeling Sensations Through Wordsĭescribing the way something feels is called tactile imagery. John Keats ends his poem “To Autumn” with auditory imagery: “Hedge-crickets sing and now with treble soft / The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft, / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Poets might also use sound devices like onomatopoeia, or words that imitate sounds, as a means of describing sounds. Poets can also describe sounds that are heard, which is called auditory imagery. May Swenson’s poem “Water Picture” uses visual imagery throughout the poem, including the lines, “Long buildings hang and wiggle gently,” and “The arched stone bridge is an eye, with underlid / in the water.” Rather than merely saying she sees reflection in the water, the speaker of the poem describes what objects she sees and how the water distorts them or makes them seem like something else. Poets will use other figurative language, such as metaphor, simile or personification to describe these images. Visual imagery appeals to the sense of sight by describing something the speaker of the poem sees.
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