8 Evocative Poems with Imagery for AP Literature

If there’s one literary device that just screams poetry, it’s imagery.

Sure, figurative language matters. Sound devices are unique to poetry. Structure and form have their place. And we’re big fans of diving into denotation and connotation.

But poems with imagery are everywhere. In our introduction to poetry lesson, one thing we wanted students to understand about poetry is that while it may inform, persuade, or even entertain, its primary purpose is to create an experience. And what is the best way to create an experience? With imagery.

Poems with imagery allow us to “feel” something with our senses, which helps us to feel something with our emotions. The more evocative a poem’s imagery is, the more immersed in the poem we feel, and the more we share in the experience the poet is trying to create.

It might be tempting to skip explicit discussion of poems with imagery. After all, imagery first appears in the Common Core ELA standards in first grade. Even if we hadn’t looked this up, we could have told you it’s one of the few literary devices our students come to us familiar with—they can usually define it and identify examples.

But it’s important to make sure you intentionally cover poems with imagery in AP Literature for a couple of reasons.

First, as we noted above, imagery is everywhere in poetry. Students are pretty much guaranteed to encounter poems with imagery in our class and on the AP exam, and we want them to be able to discuss it effectively (especially for the Free Response Questions on the exam, where they have to identify literary techniques in a piece of prose or poetry).

Second, because students started learning about imagery back in elementary school, they often overlook it in discussion, thinking it’s “too easy” or “too obvious.”

Reminding students that imagery, something they’re already comfortable with, is a great go-to in their literary toolkit gives them confidence as they dive into the challenge that is poetry.

Now, we don’t have to do quite as much heavy lifting with imagery as we do with other literary devices. Our students may need explicit teaching on metonymy or trochaic tetrameter, but we can get away with a quick review when it comes to imagery.

There are, however, a few things worth highlighting for your burgeoning literary scholars.

Suggestions for Teaching Poems with Imagery in AP Literature

This is probably a more helpful strategy if you’re working with standard-level students than with AP students, but it can still be helpful in an AP Literature class.

Asking students to draw what a poem is describing helps them start paying attention to imagery. The details that enable them to visualize and draw a scene are the details we want them to notice in a discussion of imagery.

Inviting students to draw can also be a fun way to break up the read-discuss-write pattern that features heavily in English classes.

Our main instruction when it came to imagery was the idea that imagery is language that appeals to all our senses, not just our sense of sight.

We taught our students (thanks to our excellent textbook) that there are seven types of imagery:

• Visual imagery appeals to our sense of sight: the moonlight that sparkles across the top of a lake, the bright red and yellow balloons in a child’s hand at the country fair.
• Auditory imagery appeals to our sense of hearing: the sound of a creaking floor, a beating heart, an annoying AP Scholar-style whine (just us?).
• Olfactory imagery appeals to our sense of smell: freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, rotting flesh, cheap cologne (or, perhaps more appropriately for high school teachers, Axe body spray).
• Gustatory imagery appeals to our sense of taste: back to those freshly baked, gooey chocolate chip cookies—after all, olfactory and gustatory imagery are often related.
• Tactile imagery appeals to our sense of physical touch: a clammy palm, the dew-covered grass, the biting cold rain.
• Organic imagery appeals to our sense of internal sensation: nausea, the weight of your head, the sandpaper feeling each time your eyelids close while you attempt, perhaps pathetically, to keep it up during AP Literature after having pulled an all-nighter.
• Kinesthetic imagery appeals to our sense of bodily movement: a satisfying stretch, the flying feeling that accompanies a fast run, the shooting pain of a charley horse, the knotting of muscle beneath the skin, the sharp intake of breath before the pain subsides.

Not only does this “advanced” terminology enable students to “level up” their sophistication when they discuss imagery, but it expands their understanding of what imagery is, giving them more details they can latch onto and capably discuss.

One of the most important effects of imagery is its ability to create tone and mood in a piece of poetry (or any piece of literature).

In case you need it, here’s a quick recap of the definitions we give our students for these terms:

• Tone: the writer’s or narrator’s attitude toward the subject, the reader, a character, or himself/herself.
  • In the last two lines of Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll,” the speaker comments on the scene she has described with a tone of disgust: “Consummation at last. / To every woman a happy ending.”
• Mood: the feelings evoked in readers through a poem’s diction and imagery; sometimes referred to as “atmosphere.”
  • The lonely, rugged moors and foggy weather in Sherlock Holmes’s The Hound of the Baskervilles give the mystery an eerie mood, leading the reader to wonder if there is truly a supernatural hound attacking the Baskerville family.

Tone and mood make a crucial contribution to a poem’s effects. The tone helps us unlock the poem’s purpose, or what the poet is trying to say; mood may more subtly contribute to the meaning and strongly contributes to our experience of the poem.

Imagery plays a crucial role in helping to create both, as the way something is described provides essential clues about how the author feels or how we are supposed to feel.

Students are often able to define and identify imagery, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at discussing imagery in a meaningful way.

We’ve read countless literary analysis essays in which students write about how the author or poet uses imagery to “help us picture” something or to “draw the reader in.” While these aren’t necessarily untrue, they’re not particularly helpful when analyzing how an author or poet uses language to convey meaning, the task students are meant to undertake in class discussion and literary analysis essays.

Helping students learn how to discuss the effect that is created by a particular image (like creating a specific tone or mood) allows them to discuss imagery more maturely, richly, and meaningfully than they often do on their own, setting them up to better discuss a poem’s themes or deeper meaning.

8 Poems with Imagery to Give Your Students Practice

“The Ambition Bird” by Cory Wade

Steph discovered this one while working with one of her tutoring students. His teacher assigned it to accompany Macbeth, which was a fantastic pairing. The description of ambition as a bird that relentlessly attacks captures ambition’s tendency to grab hold of a person, refusing to let go no matter how much that person achieves. We’re confident our students would have had a lot to say about it.

“Auto Wreck” by Karl Shapiro

The imagery is rich in Shapiro’s depiction of—no surprise here—a car accident. It’s easy to conjure the scene in our minds, and the reflection on a world that continues on in the face of shocking and meaningless accidents reminds us of Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—.”

“Blackberry Eating” by Galway Kinnell

Kinnell’s poem is perfect when teaching imagery for two reasons. For one thing, it expands the use of imagery beyond merely visual imagery, capturing tactile and gustatory imagery. Even better, though, is the way reading the poem aloud recreates the experience of eating a blackberry. It’s uncanny how Kinnell manipulates language in such a way that you feel you’re eating a blackberry as you read.

“I felt a funeral in my brain” by Emily Dickinson

This is the poem we most consistently used to practice discussing imagery with our students, in part because it relies on multiple types of imagery, but also because it’s a bit more complex than some of the other poems listed here. The speaker is, essentially, narrating her own funeral, which can be a bit challenging for students to track; the poem’s connection to mental illness, metaphorically represented by death, adds another layer of meaning.

“The Island Within” by Richard Blanco

We discovered this one when trying to expand the diversity of voices within our poetry unit, and Blanco’s poem about Cuba (and the complex feelings of being from two countries) is rich with imagery of all types, allowing students ample opportunities to practice identifying imagery and discussing its effects.

“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

Another one we taught frequently, Hayden’s poem reflecting on the often unappreciated acts of love parents perform for their children relies on the use of imagery—particularly hot and cold imagery—to convey its meaning, giving students plenty to discuss. It also blends senses, creating an experience of synesthesia for readers.

“To Autumn” by John Keats

We only taught this one a few times (there are other Keats poems we like better), but Keat’s ode to autumn is rich in imagery that appeals to multiple senses and perfectly captures the feeling of wistful and nostalgic reflection that we associate with autumn (and its symbolic partner, harvest and middle age).

“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” by William Carlos Williams

Speaking of seasonal associations, William’s poem richly describes springtime and allows for discussion of irony: springtime is not traditionally the season for lament.

Poems with imagery are easy to find but this doesn’t make them unimportant or “too easy” for discussion in AP Literature. Not only can imagery be used effectively to achieve a wide range of thematic purposes, but it’s a literary technique our students can discuss quite capably with some guidance. Even if you pair poems with imagery with poems that illustrate other techniques (many of the poems we’ve listed here are also rich in figurative language), making a point to focus on imagery together is well worth your time.

If you’re looking to incorporate some of the resources we’ve mentioned today into your poetry unit, you might find these three particularly helpful: our literary terms list, our 5C paragraph structure mini-lesson (which comes with a character analysis prompt that could easily be modified to help students practice discussing imagery), and our mini-unit on how to write a literary analysis essay (which includes examples of imagery).