How do sensory images affect the way you read a poem?
Sensory images take a poem from black and white to layers upon layers of color. Not only is the poem just words on paper, but it becomes a story with real people, real places and real things. Poetry with sensory imagery goes from just simply one dimensional to a whole other world that the author creates. Looking through my constantly color consumed eyes, poems without sensory imagery are colorful yes, but with sensory imagery, plain colors transform into real stories and real pictures.
One example of a poem that I believe does an exceptional job of using sensory images is Blueberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney
(https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/blueberries)
| Late August, given heavy rain and sunFor a full week, the blackberries would ripen.At first, just one, a glossy purple clotAmong others, red, green, hard as a knot.You ate that first one and its flesh was sweetLike thickened wine: summer’s blood was in itLeaving stains upon the tongue and lust forPicking. Then red ones inked up and that hungerSent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-potsWhere briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drillsWe trekked and picked until the cans were full,Until the tinkling bottom had been coveredWith green ones, and on top big dark blobs burnedLike a plate of eyes. Our hands were pepperedWith thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.But when the bath was filled we found a fur,A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.The juice was stinking too. Once off the bushThe fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fairThat all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not. |
With synesthesia, the words in this poem individually produce words of all sorts of different colors that are mismatched and don’t fit the overwhelming blue color that is provided by the images the author creates. The words that the author uses to describe what this experience is like each have their own unique colors, but when they’re all laced together to create this story, the color of the poem completely changes. It becomes a beautiful blue that puts together the words in the poem with the story behind it. Using sensory imagery (for me at least) takes a poem from a series of different words to a group of pieces that are all put together to make up the story.
Not only do these words help the poem to flow and band together, but it also allows the reader to truly see what the author wants them to and gives the author control of their writing. In the poem above, the line “You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking” (Heaney) is a fantastic example of what sensory imagery can do to elevate a poem. The author could have just simply said the first blueberry you ate was sweet, and then let the reader think about what sweet means to them in this instance, but instead he described exactly what sweet was and gave the reader no room for question, just simply the room to imagine what this looks like. Picturing something that is “sweet” is a lot more difficult than picturing something that is “sweet like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for picking.” And the sensory image in the second sentence transforms the line from just an adjective to a true, imaginative description, and it turns a two dimensional phrase into a three dimensional story.
Writing in Full Color 