Following a Pattern of Imagery

The idea

Imagery questions ask what a set of images builds, so trace the set before answering. First, mark every image in the passage, listing the concrete words that appeal to a sense. Second, group them: images of season, light, ruin and fire, for example, fall into families. Third, notice how the groups change across the passage, because a pattern usually moves. In Sonnet seventy-three the speaker offers three images of himself in decline: yellow leaves on bare boughs, twilight fading after sunset, and a fire glowing on the ashes of its youth. Each image is shorter in time than the last, a year, then a day, then the life of a fire, and that shrinking scale is the pattern. Fourth, state what the progression says about the tenor. Here the standard reading is that the speaker's sense of his remaining life narrows, which is why the couplet asks the listener to love the more because the end is near.