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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
Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Purrs, Patters, Murmurs:
The story’s brief sentences don’t often lend themselves to intricate description, but the story relies on imagery to explore the limits of the human imagination. The narrator describes the inner walls of the McClellans’ house glowing to life as the afternoon wears on:
The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky.
Lush imagery stitches itself into every sentence of this passage. Bradbury’s narrator introduces readers to an impressively crafted world of butterflies with “delicate red tissue,” the “murmur” of jungle rain, and “summer-starched” grass. The breathtaking vividness of this nursery room distinguishes it from the outside of the McClellans’ house. Where the outer walls bear the photonegative silhouettes of the house’s vaporized inhabitants, those in the nursery create a medley of rich sensations that are elsewhere unavailable in the appliances’ regimented world. Readers experience nature in its most raw and lifelike forms. Through its imagery, the story cleverly mirrors the house’s outer and inner walls against each other.
On a stylistic level, these descriptions deeply resonate with Teasdale’s poem. The McClellans’ nursery walls seem to be the only part of the house that matches the imaginative force of Teasdale’s “tremulous white” plum trees and “shimmering sound.” And much like the poem’s romantic account of the natural world, the walls may be an idealized simulacrum of reality at best. Nature—whether it be okapi feet or fiery-feathered robins—comes filtered through human and technological interpretation. We never find out whether nature actually lives up to the visions that poem and nursery lay forth.
In this sense, Bradbury’s use of paradisiacal imagery asks readers to question the relationship between human perception and reality. Does a world outside of our imagination even exist? Can our surroundings ever be separated from ourselves? The McClellans’ house is an oppressive, rigid space that denies freedom. But it may also offer the only refuge from the lifeless, radioactive world beyond its walls.
Related Themes:
