3.3.1 Imagery
Imagery emerges out of our world of five senses, namely, taste, touch, smell, hearing, and seeing. The poet may employ one, two or all of these senses in a poem in straight description or in figures of speech. (Figures of Speech are words and expressions used in an unusual, non-literal way for a specific purpose. Examples of figures of speech are metaphors, similes and others which are treated below.) Both straight description and figures of speech are imagery, that is, word pictures which can be visual (appealing to the eye), aural (appealing to the ear), tactile (appealing to the touch), gustatory (appealing to the taste) and olfactory (appealing to the smell). Sometimes, the poet may appeal to more than one sense in the word picture that is created. With the assistance of our imagination, we are able to sense what the poet is describing.
Example:
They paddle with staccato feet
In powder-pools of sunlight,
Small blue busybodies
Strutting like fat gentlemen
With hands clasped
Under their swallowtail coats;
Kell uses both metaphor and simile in his description of the pigeons. The first line of the above extract, "They paddle with staccato feet", a metaphor, is appealing to the visual. We are able to see the pigeons, propelled forward as it were, with a paddle as in a boat but the paddle is the "staccato feet" of the birds, meaning that the action/movement of the birds is disjointed and ungainly. In the second line, Kell uses another metaphor of the sunlight captured as it were within opaque pools of light. This image is appealing to the reader's sense of sight. In the third line which contains another metaphor, both the aural and the visual are being used. We can see their blue bodies which are obviously engaging in everything around them, looking around at everything and pushing themselves forward. At the same time, we are enabled to hear their "pigeon talk" which is muttered and busy and perhaps gives the sense of head movement as the birds walk. The last three lines, a sustained simile, give a picture of the pigeons' deportment and its visual impact by Kell's reference to them as fat, well-groomed and well-behaved gentlemen with their hands tucked neatly under their tails surveying the scene. This impression is conjured up with the idea of "gentlemen" in "swallowtail coats and "hands clasped". We have here, in fact, fat, satisfied and portly pigeons moving about in a slow, measured gait.
From reading these above examples, you must be able to see that the use of imagery has allowed the poet to communicate at a deeper level. He has moved from the surface of the experience into what he is seeing, hearing and feeling.