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Idioms
Definition of Imagery
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition
Book 4, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Plashwater Weir Mill Lock:
Chapter 6 of Book 4 of Our Mutual Friend opens with some of the novel’s most vivid instances of imagery. As Eugene Wrayburn wanders through Plashwater Weir Mill in pursuit of Lizzie, Dickens brings to life a village scene:
There were men, women, and children in the groups, and there was no want of lively colour to flutter in the gentle evening wind. [...] Into the sheet of water reflecting the flushed sky in the foreground of the living picture, a knot of urchins were casting stones, and watching the expansion of the rippling circles. So, in the rosy evening, one might watch the ever-widening beauty of the landscape [...] beyond the deep green fields of corn, so prospering, that the loiterers in their narrow threads of pathway seemed to float immersed breast-high—beyond the hedgerows and the clumps of trees—beyond the windmills on the ridge—away to where the sky appeared to meet the earth, as if there were no immensity of space between mankind and Heaven.
The novel’s account of the suburban village does not lack for expressive details. Dickens creates a portrait of the natural world in its nurturing solace and beauty. The placid “sheet of water” surrounded by “deep green fields of corn” and “clumps of trees” in the “rosy evening” summons the appearance of an idyllic, pastoral domesticity. The chapter brings together the “mingling of various voices” and the “lively color” to plunge the reader in an immersive sensory experience. In Dickens’s meditative stroke of poetry, Plashwater Weir Mill seems so perfect that it shortens the distance between “mankind and Heaven.”
But these descriptions may be equally notable for their deceptiveness. This first preview from afar resembles nothing like what actually follows. Subsequent descriptions of the town reveal it to be as grungy as those first impressions were rosy. The “village dogs” frequent the public-houses, and the local fairgrounds feature seedy gingerbread vendors beside low-brow spectacles of a “Fat Lady” and “Learned Pig.” What had been a picture-perfect scene turns out to be in fact a “scene of depravity.” This first paragraph sets up the reader for a lesson about misleading appearances, exposing the distance between the narrator’s wishful imaginings and the actual circumstances. In this sharp juxtaposition, Dickens offers a critique of appearance and its underlying realities.
Related Themes:
