Seminar read and analyze it. What Is Imagery? Learn About the Types of Imagery in Poetry With Examples

Auditory imagery. This form of poetic imagery appeals to the reader’s sense of hearing or sound. It may include music and other pleasant sounds, harsh noises, or silence. In addition to describing a sound, the poet might also use a sound device like onomatopoeia, or words that imitate sounds, so reading the poem aloud recreates the auditory experience. In John Keats’ short 1820 poem “To Autumn”—the final poem he wrote before abandoning the craft because poetry wasn’t paying the bills—he concludes with auditory imagery:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Keats personifies fall as if it is a musician with a song to sing, and then creates an audible soundtrack from the sounds the surrounding wildlife is making. The gnats form a wailful choir, the lambs bleat, the crickets sing, the red-breast whistles, and the swallows twitter—all sounds marking the passage of time and the advance of winter.

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  Gustatory imagery. In this form of poetic imagery, the poet appeals to the reader’s sense of taste by describing something the speaker or narrator of the poem tastes. It may include sweetness, sourness, saltiness, savoriness, or spiciness. This is especially effective when the poet describes a taste that the reader has experienced before and can recall from sense memory. In Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem “This Compost,” he uses some disturbing gustatory imagery:
  

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
Whitman is pondering the life cycle and how it is that the Earth produces “herbs, roots, orchards, grain” that are enjoyable whilst processing a compost of the many human corpses buried under soil everywhere. Although most people have not eaten human flesh, the “sour dead” and “foul liquid and meat” conjure the taste of rotting meat

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  Tactile imagery. In this form of poetic imagery, the poet appeals to the reader’s sense of touch by describing something the speaker of the poem feels on their body. It may include the feel of temperatures, textures, and other physical sensations. For example, look at Robert Browning’s 1836 poem “Porphyria’s Lover”:
  

When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm
Browning uses tactile imagery of the chill of a storm, the sensation when a door is closed to it, and the fire’s blaze coming from a furnace grate to describe the warmth of the cottage.

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