This document provides guidance on analyzing imagery and figurative language through close reading of texts. It defines types of imagery like simile, metaphor, and personification and teaches how to identify them in examples. Instructions are given for answering imagery questions, including quoting the text, identifying the root of the comparison, and explaining its effect.

1. Close Reading
Imagery and other Figurative
Language

2. Learning Objectives
 Know what figurative and literal language
looks like
 To be able to identify the different types of
imagery
 Be able to deconstruct images and explain
what is being compared to what
 To know how to tackle these types of
question

3. Literal or Figurative?
 Complete Starter Activity in NQ on literal
and figurative language.
 Make notes about each term, and include
an example.

4. Types of imagery
 Simile
 Metaphor and extended metaphor
 personification

5. Identify the type of imagery used
 “The broad stream in his banks complaining…” from
Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott
 “It was as though the note of the fiddle touched some sub-
conscious nerve that had to be answered- like a baby’s
cry”. From Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer
Morning
 “Europe is an express train heading for monetary union.
But a train can come off the rails. Last week we were
urged to take our seats in the dining-car. We should have
been just in time for the signalman’s errors in France and
Germany. The row on the footplate was set off by the
German finance minister…”

6. How to tackle imagery questions
 Ask yourself:
 What is being compared to what?
 In what respects are the two similar?
 What does the comparison suggest?

7. How to Answer an Imagery
Question
 Quote
 Identify
 Job /root: the root of the image- what is
being compared to what? Show
understanding of the things compared by
explaining using your own words.
 Explain / effect: what does the comparison
suggest or imply? Why has the writer used
it?

8. Try this…
 …… is compared to …..(use your own
words for each part of the comparison)
 This suggests that….. is……. because…

9. Model Answer
 In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo compares Juliet to the sun:
 “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
 Juliet, the girl, is compared to the sun. The sun is what
brings daylight and life to the world, and it shines brighter
than the moon.
 This suggests that Juliet is very different and much more
beautiful than all the other girls, and that she has made
Romeo’s world a better place.

10. Other Types of Figurative
Language
 Sound: Onomatopoeia, alliteration,
assonance
 Hyperbole
 Understatement
 Euphemism
Make notes from P44-45 about what each of
these are.

11. Practice
 Pages 45-47 of Language Skills book