Graphic. Punctuation
Phonetic Stylistic Devices
English Vocabulary
Lexical Stylistic Devices
Syntactical Stylistic Devices
Decoding Stylistics
Biographies
Guidelines
Analysis
Texts
Guidelines
Imagery
Images are words or phrases that appeal to our senses. Consider these lines taken from Wilfred Owen's poem:Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags we cursed though sludge.
The poet is describing his experience as a soldier during the First World War. Through his choice of words he creates:
• visual images: bent double, old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed;
• aural images: coughing like hags, cursed;
• a tactile image: sludge.
If we replace the imagistic words that Owen uses with more generic terms:
Physically exhausted, the soldiers marched across the wet terrain cursing their fate.
the impact on our senses is lost.
A writer may use an image to help us:
• re-live a sense experience that we have already had. We may be able to conjure up the sound of old women coughing or the sensation of walking through mud from past experience;
• have a aew sense experience. This is achieved when our sense memories are called forth in a pattern that does not correspond to any of our actual experiences. Exploited in this way, images allow us to see, hear, feel, smell and taste experiences that are new to us.
We use the term imagery to refer to combinations or clusters of images that are used to create a dominant impression. Death, corruption and disease imagery, for example, creates a powerful network in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. Writers often develop meaningful patterns in their imagery, and a writer's choice and arrangement of images is often an important clue to the overall meaning of his work.
