Imagery: The Third Quality of Effective Diction

Imagery has two general meanings when applied to diction: the images or pictures that concrete words sometimes suggest and figures of speech such as similes and metaphors.

The first meaning includes the pictorial quality of phrases such as an anvil's edge, green belts, popping up like corn.



The chief element in all figures of speech is an imaginative comparison in which dissimilar things are described as having a meaningful similarity.

The writer, by thus linking the unfamiliar with the familiar, creates a context in which the reader may more easily or clearly understand a new aspect of the subject or new information and ideas.


Here's an example:

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas (Alfred Noyes)

The line of poetry compares the moon to a sailing ship. Now in most ways the moon is quite unlike a ship.

But as the poet watches it alternately emerging from behind the clouds and disappearing into them again, he thinks of a ship alternately emerging and disappearing from view as it rides the troughs and crests of the waves. In his imagination the moon is being tossed by the clouds as a ship is tossed by the waves.

The most commonly used figures of speech are simile, metaphor, analogy, personification, and allusion. Each figure makes a comparison, but each has its own characteristic form to use.

Simile

A simile compares two things--A and B--by asserting that one is like the other. A simile usually contains the word like, as, or so and is to transfer to A the qualities or feelings associated with B. 

Thus, when Annie Dillard in "Total Eclipse" describes a solar eclipse, she imagines that the sky (A)--or more precisely the moon--functions like the lens cover (B) on a camera, covering the lens and shutting out all light:

The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover.

Here are some other similes:

• Insects in the first frosts of autumn all run down like little clocks. (Loren Eisely, "How Flowers Changed the World," The Star Thrower) 

• When, as you approach, [the iguanas] swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple of the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail. (Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa)

• Floating on one's back is like riding between two skies. (Edward Hoagland, "Summer Pond")

• His face was as blank as a pan of uncooked dough. (William Faulkner)

Metaphor

A metaphor compares two things by identifying one with the other. It doesn't say that A is like B but instead states that A is B. 

Lewis Thomas uses a metaphor when he suggests that the sky encloses the earth just as a membrane surrounds an organ or cell.

Aloft, a floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. (Lewis Thomas, "The World's biggest Membrane." The Lives of a Cell)

Here are other metaphors:

• Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. (Henry David Thoreau, Walden) 

• Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. (Langston Hughes, The Big Sea)

Many words and phrases no longer thought of as figures of speech were originally metaphors or similes.

"At Bay" originally described a hunted animal cornered by pursuers and forced to turn and fight the baying hounds.

"Crestfallen" first described a cock that had been humbled in a cockfight. Many other expressions can be analyzed as metaphors although you no longer think of them as figures of speech--expressions such as the "mouth" of a river, the "face" of a clock, the "brow" of a hill.

Such expressions are often called, metaphorically, dead or frozen metaphors. They are so common in the language that it's hard to write a paragraph without them, but you should try to avoid those (such as "rosy red," "dirt cheap," and "face the music") that have become clichés. 

Analogy

An analogy is an extended metaphor that, through several sentences or paragraphs, explains an abstract idea or seeks to persuade readers that because two things are alike, a conclusion drawn from one suggests a similar conclusion from the other. 

In the following passage, Robert Jastrow uses analogy to explain the shape of our galaxy:

The Galaxy is flattened by its rotating motion in the shape of a disk whose thickness is roughly one-fifth of its diameter. Most of the stars in the Galaxy are in this disk, although some are located outside it. A relatively small, spherical cluster of stars, called the nucleus of the Galaxy, bulges out of the disk at the center. The center structure resembles a double sombrero with the gigantic nucleus as the crown and the disk as the brim. The sun is located in the brim of the sombrero about three-fifths of the way out from the center of the edge. When we look into the sky in the direction of the disk we see so many stars that they are not visible as separate points of light, but blend together into a luminous band stretching across the sky. This band is called the Milky Way. (Robert Jastrow, "The Size of Things," Red Giants and White Dwarfs)

Personification

Personification is a figure of speech by which inanimate objects or abstractions are given human or animal characteristics. 

For instance, winds are said to "roar" or "bite"; flames "eat hungrily" at a burning house and many even "devour" it; a tree may "bow" before a gale or in fair weather "stretch" its branches; truth or virtue emerges "triumphant"; and justice is "blind."  In the previous examples, the writer imagines a resemblance between the actions observed and the actions of  an animal or person.

Implied comparisons are often effective, but they should be used with restraint. If they seem exaggerated ("the waves roared their threat to the listening clouds while the palm trees nodded their approval"), your reader is likely to reject them as "far fetched" or as an unsuccessful attempt to be "literary."

Allusion

An allusion is a comparison between a historical, literary, or mythological event or person and the subject under discussion. 

When a scientific discovery is said to possess Copernican significance, it is being associated with Copernicus' theory that revolutionized the way we saw the universe (the earth rotating around the sun rather than the sun rotating around the earth).

Or when a film is a called another Star Wars, it is being likened to one of the most extraordinary films ever made about outer space.

A successful allusion provides a flash of wit or insight and gives your readers the pleasure of recognition. But you must be reasonably sure that an allusion is suited to your audience; if your readers don't recognize or understand the allusion, they will be confused and not appreciate its effect. 

In other words, calling a research paper a "Sisyphean task" is amusing only if your audience remembers that Sisyphus was condemned forever to roll a huge stone up a steep hill in Hades, only to have it roll back down again just as it neared the top.

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