Poetic Images

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• Examples of poetic images

The poetic images They are figures of speech that are used in literature (especially in poetry) to describe something real through certain words that, in their literal sense, refer to something else.

Also called sensory figures, poetic images refer to sensations that we obtain through the five senses. That is why we speak of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or taste images.

• See also: Short poems

Examples of poetic images

Olfactory images

1. A mature perfume on the entire wall. (Robert Frost)
2. Since I applied my lips to your still full glass, and put my pale forehead between your hands; since once I could breathe the sweet breath of your soul, perfume hidden in the shadow. (Victor Hugo)

Visual images

1. The sad grid. Glow, and the whole house warm. (Robert Browning)
2. The sad wind soon awoke, tore the tops of the elms out of spite, and did its worst to upset the lake. (Robert Browning)
3. They are witnesses, Thursdays and humerus bones, loneliness, rain, roads. (Cesar Vallejo)
4. Time enlarged in the corners, It stopped around the heart. (José Agustín Goytisolo)
5. I want the wind to run out of valleys. I want the night to be without eyes, and my heart without the golden flower. (Federico García Lorca)
6. The night to the mountain rises. Hunger goes down to the river. (Pablo Neruda)
7. Woven you are spring, lovers, of earth and water and wind and sun woven. The saw in your panting breasts, in the eyes the flowered fields. (Antonio Machado)
8. Earth has the attitude of a woman with a child in her arms. I am getting to know the maternal sense of things. The mountain that looks at me is also a mother, and in the afternoons the mist plays like a child on its shoulders and knees. (Gabriela Mistral)
9. Because I laugh as if I had gold mines, excavating myself in the very courtyard of my house. You can shoot me with your words, you can hurt me with your eyes, you can kill me with your hatred, and still, like air, I rise. (Maya Angelou)

Auditory imaging

1. If you are looking for roads, in bloom on earth, kill your words, and listen to your old soul. (Antonio Machado)
2. On the snow you can hear the night slip (Vicente Huidobre)
3. The girl sitting by the lake, reading poetry from her blue book. With sorrow, sighs, collect your dreams. He keeps them between the sheets of his blue book. (Ramón Almagro)

Tactile imaging

1. It is then that the sky and I converse freely, and thus I will be useful when I finally tend: then the trees will be able to touch me for once, and the flowers will have time for me. (Sylvia Plath)
2. You love me alba, you love me foam, you love me mother-of-pearl. May azucena be above all others, pure. Of faint perfume. Corolla closed. (Alfonsina Storni)

• More examples in: Sensory images