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Denotation and Connotation + Imagery

The document discusses denotation and connotation, as well as imagery in poetry. It defines denotation as the basic literal meaning of a word, while connotation refers to the feelings, ideas, and overtones suggested by a word. Imagery makes use of the five senses to create mental pictures that add depth and defamiliarize language. Examples are provided of different types of imagery, including visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic, and organic imagery. Analysis is also given of imagery in poems like "To Autumn" by John Keats.

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29 views

Denotation and Connotation + Imagery

The document discusses denotation and connotation, as well as imagery in poetry. It defines denotation as the basic literal meaning of a word, while connotation refers to the feelings, ideas, and overtones suggested by a word. Imagery makes use of the five senses to create mental pictures that add depth and defamiliarize language. Examples are provided of different types of imagery, including visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic, and organic imagery. Analysis is also given of imagery in poems like "To Autumn" by John Keats.

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zh bhr
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Denotation, Connotation, and

Imagery
I. Denotation and Connotation
Denotation and Connotation

Connotation: what a word


Denotation: what a word
suggests.
expresses.
Its overtones, ideas and
The basic part of a meaning;
feelings provoked.
the literal meaning of a word.
Connotations are contextual.
Everyday language.
Poetic language.

• Connotations enrich poetry and add to its depth.


• The skilled poet takes use of multiple denotations and connotations.
• “The poets always look for the secret affinities of words that allow them to be
brought together with soft explosions of meaning”.
A type of bird Innocence,
with short legs, peace,
also known as tranquility, love,
pigeon. purity.
Sonnet 138: “When my love swears that she
is made of truth”
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
 The Dark Lady is a woman described in Shakespeare's sonnets (sonnets
127–154) and so called because the poems make it clear that she has
black wiry hair and dark, brown, "dun" coloured skin.
 Sonnet 138 unveils a paradox that underlines the speaker's personal
struggle to come to terms with issues of deceit and trust in love. The sonnet's
tone shifts from a recognition of the lie about his age to developing a sense
of trust in exchanging the lie.
 Lying: mistress to the speaker, the speaker to the mistress, speaker to
himself.
 “love’s best habit is in seeming trust”: paradoxically both decline and
continuation.
“Desert Places” by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast


In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.


All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness


Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WiIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces


Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Loneliness
Loneliness
and
and
isolation
isolation
of
in nature
humans

Description of the Description of Description of the


The massive void
snow covered loneliness in the loneliness of the
between the stars
field: nature scene speaker

Isolation, the
Isolation and
incomprehensible
meaninglessness within
world, meaninglessness
Related themes: Darkness, loneliness, formlessness,
meaninglessness, death
II. Imagery
Imagery
 Human experience comes largely from the five senses.
 Poetry uses imagery in order to defamiliarize, add depth, and represent.
Therefore, image here means a “mental picture”.
 C. Day Lewis: an image is a picture made out of words. A poem may itself
be an image composed from a multiplicity of images.
 Imagery makes poetry concrete, as opposed to abstract.
Visual: the most common

Auditory: An image that represents a sound

Olfactory: An image that represents a smell

Gustatory: An image that represents a taste

Tactile: An image that represents a touch: hardness, softness, wetness, heat, and
cold

Kinesthetic: An image that represents movement.

Organic: An image that represents internal sensation: hunger, thirst, fatigue, nausea.
To Autumn
 “To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off.
Like the others, it shows Keats’s speaker paying homage
to a particular goddess—in this case, the deified season
of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up
the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and
change: Autumn in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and
plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s desolation,
as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered
from the fields, the lambs of spring are now “full grown,”
and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for
their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable
loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving
moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple,
uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.
To autumn: a passage towards death

Early autumn and Life trajectory:


maturity of crops, Course of the day: childhood and
mid autumn and morning, touch, maturity
harvest, late afternoon, dusk and sight, old age
autumn and winter and sounds

Cycle of life

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