Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Imagery and metaphor
The arresting poem
Short-form genres

Imagery and metaphor are two different ways in which things can be described or illuminated upon in poetry (and in all forms of writing).

DEFINITION

Imagery is the description of a person, place, or item using the five senses. As mentioned earlier, a metaphor is a comparison between two things, based on resemblance or similarity, without using the words like or as.

Imagery and metaphor are commonly used in poetry to enhance authors’ descriptions. Like many other explicative techniques, the more authors use imagery and metaphor effectively in their writing, the easier it becomes for their readers to form a mental representation of what’s being discussed.

Throughout all sorts of writing, imagery is used to describe and illuminate so readers can more easily form mental images about what they’re reading. Imagery relies on sensory cues from all five senses to inform readers. A line about a dog as “large, mean-looking and loudly barking” uses the senses of sight and sound, and imagery that refers to nasty ocean water as “cold, salty, and putrid” employs touch, taste, and smell. Metaphors are sometimes a type of imagery when they convey sensory information about a subject. Most importantly, imagery and metaphor can both help enhance an author’s poetic descriptions.

Metaphors figuratively describe one thing as actually being another, using a type of comparison to illustrate how two seemingly different things are actually similar in some way. Similes, as opposed to metaphors, use the words like or as to describe and compare.

Sometimes, metaphors can be less straightforward and require more thinking than imagery. For example, if a writer wrote, “American democracy is still in its infancy,” you would have to use your powers of reasoning to figure out exactly what this implied.

Metaphors can be powerful ways to describe people. Saying someone is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” implies he or she is mean, untrustworthy, and possibly violent, even though he or she appears to be nice and harmless. (However, you shouldn’t use that line in your work because it’s a cliché.)

WRITING PROMPT

Try to write a number of lines of poetry that qualify as both images and metaphors. This is a helpful brainstorming exercise that can result in material suitable for an entire poem.