Mr. Allen's Economics Class: October 2026

Experience comes to us largely through the senses. My experience of a spring day, for instance, may consist only of certain emotions I feel and partly of certain thoughts I think, but most of it will be a cluster of sense impressions. It will consists of seeing blue sky and white clouds, budding leaves and daffodils; of hearing robins and bluebirds singing in the earling morning; of smelling damp earth and blossoming hyacinths; and of feeling a fresh wind against my cheek. The poet seeking to express his experience of a spring day must therefore provide a selection of the sense impressions he has... Without doing so he will probably fail to evoke the emotions that accompanied his sensations. His language, therefore, must be more sensuous than ordinary language. It must be more full of imagery.

Imagery may be defined as the representation through language of sense experience. Poetry appeals directly to our senses, of course, through its music and rhythms, which we actually hear when it is read aloud. But indirectly it appeals to our senses through imagery, the representation to the imagination of sense experience. The word image perhaps most often suggests a mental picture, something seen in the mind's eye - and visual imagery is the most frequently occurring kind of imagery in poetry. But and image may also represent a sound; a smell; a taste; a tactile experience, such as hardness, wetness, or cold; an internal sensation, such as hunger, thirst, or nausea; or movement or tension in the muscles and joints.

MEETING AT NIGHT

The gray sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In firey ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,