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Thursday, April 25, 2019

All about imagery

A simple note I just wrote that someone in here may find useful based on today's Glopowrimo prompt.
For those who don't know the kinds of imagery there are and that you can use:
Based on Keats' To Autumn'
They are:
1. Visual imagery - for seeing. "the vines that around the thatch-eves run"
2. Auditory imagery - for hearing. "in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn.. lambs BLEAT...crickets sing...the red breast WHISTLES"
3. Tactile imagery - describing the sensation of touch. "barred clouds..."Touch the Stubble"-plains with rosy hue"
4. Gustatory imagery - sense of taste. "to...plump the hazel shells with a 'Sweet' kernel"
5. Olfactory imagery - sense of smell "drowsed with the 'Fume' of poppies"
6. Kinetic imagery - sense of movement "thy 'hair soft-lifted' by the 'Winnowing' wind."
7. Organic imagery - describing a thing without naming it in such a way the reader correctly guesses it name, i.e; accurately. If the great ode or poem "To Autumn" did not have a name, it would be a perfect example of this.
9. Related to this is onomatopoeia where through sound you capture the sound of the thing being described - "And gathering swallows TWITTER in the skies"
10. And last of all synesthesia - "Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense (for example, hearing) is simultaneously perceived as if by one or more additional senses such as sight. Another form of synesthesia joins objects such as letters, shapes, numbers or people's names with a sensory perception such as smell, color or flavor."
Example:
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
"And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees..."
The last four lines are an example of synesthesia where Keats connects the sun and autumn to being conspiratorial innoculators, female and male, lovers, mischievous just past youth friends with benefits ("close-bosom friend of the maturing sun"), mother and father, making babies, having children, bringing them up, growing them- sexually, sensuously - making the shells plump, and the gourds swell - the inversion of verbs is really effective - and the flowers bud or of making them in other words pregnant, mixing sight and feel/touch in those images and making us see the process from outside/inside - a curious ability only the best or most deranged poets have!

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