Imagery
Imagery
Definition of Imagery
Imagery means to use figurative language to represent objects,
actions, and ideas in such a way that it appeals to our physical
senses.
Romeo praises Juliet by saying that she appears more radiant than
the brightly lit torches in the hall. He says that at night her face glows
like a bright jewel shining against the dark skin of an African. Through
the contrasting images of light and dark, Romeo portrays
Juliet’s beauty.
The animal sounds in the above excerpt keep appealing to our sense
of hearing. We hear the lambbleating and the crickets chirping. We
hear the whistles of the redbreast robin and the twitters of swallows
in the skies. Keats call these sounds the song of autumn.
“When the others went swimming my son said he was going in, too.
He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all
through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no
thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and
bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the
small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly
my groin felt the chill of death.”
“It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on
the outside of my little window… Now, I saw the damp lying on the
bare hedges and spare grass, … On every rail and gate, wet lay
clammy; and the marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on
the post directing people to our village—a direction which they never
accepted, for they never came there—was invisible to me until I was
quite close under it.”
The repeated use of the words “damp” and “wet” makes us feel how
miserable it was for him that damp and cold morning. The thick
“marsh-mist” aids our imagination to visualize the scene of morning in
a marshland.
Function of Imagery
The function of imagery in literature is to generate a vibrant and
graphic presentation of a scene that appeals to as many of the
reader’s senses as possible. It aids the reader’s imagination to
envision the characters and scenes in the literary piece clearly. Apart
from the above-mentioned function, images drawn by using figures of
speech like metaphor, simile, personification, and onomatopoeia,
serve the function of beautifying a piece of literature.