What is Imagery in Literature? (Definition)
Imagery refers to language that creates vivid sensory experiences for the reader. While imagery is most commonly visual, it can appeal to any of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Strong imagery helps readers see, hear, and feel what the writer describes.
In literary analysis, imagery often refers not just to individual descriptions but to sustained patterns of sensory language throughout a text. Romeo and Juliet's imagery of light and darkness, for instance, is not a single metaphor but a system of connected images that develops meaning across the entire play.
Examples of Imagery
Example 1: Imagery in Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare creates visual imagery of sunrise—Juliet as a light source that transforms darkness into day. This image is part of the play's sustained pattern of light and dark imagery that connects love with illumination and the outside world with shadow.
Example 2: Imagery in Great Expectations
Dickens opens with imagery of the flat, exposed marshland—visual (grey landscape), tactile (cold wind), and auditory (distant sea). The bleak sensory details establish both setting and mood, making the reader feel Pip's isolation.
Example 3: Imagery in Jane Eyre
Brontë's fire imagery is visual (darting tongues of flame), tactile (heat closing around the sleeping body), and almost gustatory in its hunger. The image of fire that can either kill Rochester or bring Jane to him captures the ambivalence of passion in the novel: the same force that endangers can also illuminate and rescue.