Imagery in Poetry

Imagery may be perceived as pictures/photographs or pictures of people but the definition that concerns the poetic imagery is beyond mere pictorial representations of humans. The Oxford Adv. Learner's dictionary, on page 763 of its 9th edition, defines imagery as language that produces pictures in the minds of people reading or listening. Therefore, imagery may be defined as the selective and effective use of words to create pictorial impression into the imagination of the reader. By selective and effective, we mean sentiment and discrimination of words that will appropriately bring out the effectiveness, that is, real thought of the poet. Since poetry is based on emotions, deep thought, it is therefore necessary to discriminately select words for effectiveness. Imagine a pastor saying to a drug addict: "bro., you need to be baptized because it's good". The man may not take that seriously because those words are still general but consider the difference in the version of the pastor's words below: " bro., you need to die; I mean, you dying right now before it gets late; I'm dead so I'm happy. I say, die with Christ and rise with him". Could you feel the strangeness in that? There may be a difference in "there is a rat in this room" and "the rat is in this room". The second sentence contains a meaning above the proper denotations. It means a traitor is present. This means that not all sentences may pass for imagery.

Imagery in poetry is in two major forms known as Subjective (feelings) and Kinesthetics (movements). While a subjective imagery evokes feelings, the kinesthetic evokes movement. Consider these:

• While raining down the ramp, he caught the billet-doux in his hand.
• "...And so I can sing of my own sad plight".

The first verse symbolizes Kinesthetics (raining means very swift running) and visual (caught hints at saw). The second cited verse gives a sense of feelings (subjective). It is possible to have more than one type of imagery in a verse, as in example one.

Apart from the two major forms of imagery, there are still some types of imagery known as the following: gustatory/taste, olfactory/smell, tactic/touch, auditory/sound and visual/sight. In the first imagery examples, you will have noticed I said it was comprised of both Kinesthetics and Visual. If you properly examine the example, you will notice the word raining meant a kind of swift running and the word caught hinted the idea of seeing something, the billet-doux in his hand. That was what I called visual since visual means sight or seeing.

I will now give you examples on other imagery types.

• Auditory: their hullabaloo from outside distracted me from studying.
• Tactic: o' my wife, I've never felt such softness that suits the hands like this of your life oranges.
• Gustatory: the lance of my granny's melon soup on this tongue reminded me of my childhood days.
• Olfactory: you may think you scent good but instead of luring me, it puts me off.

If you peruse the underlined expressions well, you will see that they give senses of their functions and the effectiveness. Those words were selectively and effectively used.
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