IMAGERY 301

IMAGERY

What's an image?

Language that describes any of our five senses

Images are a kind of energy you can exchange with your reader; you take a walk outside after the first snowfall of the season, fill your eyes with the dazzling surfaces of the fields and your lungs with the sharp pure air. Your boots sink in, crunching down to the frozen earth, and when you return to the cabin the warmth feels like a pair of gloved hands placed on your cold ears. You sit down and write about the snow. Miles away and years later, someone—a reader—closes her eyes and experiences it.

--Adonizzio and Laux

Images can be literal, describing exactly what is there:

a red balloon floating up into a bright blue sky

the softness of the cat's fur under her fingers

They can also be figurative, going beyond what is actually there and and making a comparison:

the balloon, floating red and small as a cherry

high up in the sky

the soft meadow of cat's fur beneath

her fingertips

They pull us in and help us experience the subject of the writing for ourselves rather than telling us what to think.

Writing is one of the most abstract of all art forms. Unlike painting, music, dance, sculpture, etc. it has no direct pathway to the senses. All we get is little black markings on a white piece of paper.

Writers have to work to CREATE that pathway to the senses so that the writing comes alive for readers. Sense images can help readers join in on the experience and feel what the writing has to say. They can make readers involved in what's happening--and they can also make readers care.

Concrete details that involve the senses give the mind something to grasp. Reading about abstract ideas is much more difficult than reading a description full of sensory details.

If you're a writer, adding sensory images to your writing can also convince your readers that what we have to say is relevant, important, and true. Concrete sensory details say we know what we're talking about. We've been there. For real.

Images are seductive in themselves, but they’re not just scenery—they embody emotions and ideas.

If you read the images in a literary text carefully, they will tell you what the speaker feels about the subject

At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,

blossoms on our magnolia ignite

the morning with their murderous five days’ white.

--Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife”

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow…

--Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question…

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

--T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

and you can learn to use them in your writing to engage your audience, to create a certain tone or mood in a piece, to tell your audience how you or your characters feel about the subject matter, etc.

Images haunt. There is a whole mythology built on this fact: Cezanne painting till his eyes bled, Wordsworth wandering the Lake Country hills in an impassioned daze. Blake describes it very well, and so did a colleague of Tu Fu who said to him, “It is like being alive twice.” Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implications outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

--Robert Hass,Twentieth Century Pleasures

LYING IN A HAMMOCK AT WILLIAM DUFFY'S FARM IN PINE ISLAND, MINNESOTA

James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

My black face fades,

hiding inside the black granite.

I said I wouldn’t,

dammit: No tears.

I’m stone. I’m flesh.

My clouded reflection eyes me

like a bird of prey, the profile of night

slanted against morning. I turn

this way—the stone lets me go.

I turn that way—I’m inside

the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

again, depending on the light

to make a difference.

I go down the 58,022 names,

half-expecting to find

my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson;

I see the booby trap’s white flash.

Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse

but when she walks away

the names stay on the wall.

Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s

wings cutting across my stare.

The sky. A plane in the sky.

A white vet’s images floats

closer to me, then his pale eyes

look through mine. I’m a window.

He’s lost his right arm

inside the stone. In the black mirror

a woman’s trying to erase names:

No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

miss rosie

Lucille Clifton

when i watch you

wrapped up like garbage

sitting, surrounded by the smell

of too old potato peels

or

when i watch you

in your old man’s shoes

with the little toe cut out

sitting, waiting for your mind

like next week’s grocery

i say

when i watch you

you wet brown bag of a woman

who used to be the best looking gal in georgia

used to be called the Georgia Rose

i stand up

through your destruction

i stand up

From “The Things They Carried”

Tim O’Brien

In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble, an ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky-white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet’s sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.

Silos

--Rita Dove

Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky’s

shabby blue, they were always too white and

suddenly there.

They were never fingers, never xylophones, although once

a stranger said they put him in mind of Pan’s pipes

and all the lost songs of Greece. But to the townspeople

they were like cigarettes, the smell chewy and bitter

like a field shorn of milkweed, or beer brewing, or

a fingernail scorched over a flame.

No, no, exclaimed the children. They’re a fresh packet of chalk,

dreading math work.

They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They

were the ribs of the modern world.

When I was torn by war

             - Sinan Antoon

I took a brush

Immersed in death

And drew a window

On war's wall

I opened it

Searching

For something

But

I saw another war

And a mother

Weaving a shroud

For the dead man

Still in her womb

 Baghdad, 1990

OBEDIENCE OF THE CORPSE

C.D. Wright

The midwife puts a rag in the dead woman's hand,

takes the hairpins out.

She smells apples,

wonders where she keeps them in the house.

Nothing is under the sink

but a broken sack of potatoes growing eyes.

She hopes the mother's milk is good awhile longer,

the woman up the road is still nursing.

She remembers the neighbor

and the dead woman never got along.

A limb breaks.

She knows it's not the wind.

Somebody needs to set out some poison.

She looks to see if the woman wrote down any names,

finds a white shirt to wrap the baby in.

It's beautiful she thinks--

snow nobody has walked on.

Exercises

Show Don’t Tell (From Steve Kowit)

We'll look at a few statements that tell us what someone was feeling. Replace them with brief sensory descriptions that convey rather than state the emotions.

EXAMPLE:

She felt so sad.

Her eyes drifted down to the wilted flowers, their purples and pinks turned to a single shade of faded, ruined brown. The hot sun burned down upon her skin. It hadn’t rained all summer, and she could smell the dry dust rising up around her. She realized now how much she was like those flowers.

He felt angry.

The letter confused her.

She begged him to stay.

Facing It

Yusef Komunyaka

A&L

DEPRESSED BY A BOOK OF BAD POETRY, I WALK TOWARD AN UNUSED PASTURE AND INVITE THE INSECTS TO JOIN ME

James Wright

Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.

I climb a slight rise of grass.

I do not want to disturb the ants

Who are walking single file up the fence post,

Carrying small white petals,

Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.

I close my eyes for a moment, and listen.

The old grasshoppers

Are tired, they leap heavily now,

Their thighs burdened.

I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.

Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins

In the maple trees.

Describe a pair of shoes in such a way that a reader will think of death. Use at least three of your five senses. Do not mention death in the description. (From Addonizio and Laux)

Describe a pair of shoes in such a way that a reader will think of death. Do not mention death in the description.

(From Addonizio and Laux)

Describe a piece of clothing you once loved. Use as many senses as you can to make your love for the object clear without stating that you loved it.

That summer at camp he missed his mother.