Imagery and Sound in Poetry
Imagery and sound are both very evident in the poems “When My Brother Was an Aztec”, “It Was the Animals”, and “My Brother, My Wound”. All three of them use sound devices and imagery to paint a vivid picture, the authors do this while capturing the attention of their readers.
For example, in the poem “My Brother, My Wound”, by Natalie Diaz, she uses words that makes you use your imagination to think about what would it look like. When she says “Light hummed the holes like yellow jackets. My mouth was a nest torn empty.” You can almost picture what that looks like in your mind, she does this for you to actually feel what it would be like. She then goes on and says “I never knew I was also a lamp — until the light fell out of me, dripped down my thigh, flew up in me, caught in my throat like a canary.” Her words are capturing, she does this to make you focus on what she’s trying to explain to you and what it looks like.
It’s hard not to get caught up in the biographical specs of Natalie Diaz’s writing. The poems, and her author bio and interviews, invite the reader to draw direct connections between her varied identities—Mojave, a former pro-basketball player, an MFA-holder, and an archivist of Indigenous languages— in, When My Brother Was an Aztec. Diaz has done a lot of different kinds of things that her stories have stories, but what she does on the page is a lot more dexterous and mind boggling than confessionalism or any of its other offshoots. When My Brother Was an Aztec is a spacious, well put together collection, one that puts in work addressing the author’s divergent experiences—whether it be family, politics, basketball ,code trading, or government issues.
The source material is without a doubt valuable and necessary, but what helps make Diaz’s work rare is the language itself. She is a capacious writer, one who is real good at allusion, metaphor, form, and narrative. She takes her experiences, turns them into English, Mojave, or Spanish, then twists the moment with wit and grace. In Diaz’s hands, the narratives are not held to the original experience. Rather, the experience becomes a new machine for myth, one that is, at the same time, specific to Indigenous people and universally American. She uses sound devices like cacophonies, for example, she uses the word Aztec, and then she says “twitching like snakes—“.
She also uses the sound device of reiteration in the poem “It Was the Animals”. She uses the word “wood” a lot to show you the strength of wood and the symbolism it had. When God told Noah to build an ark, he used wood, and when she starts talking about Noah from the Bible, you immediately feel how important it is. Another sound device she uses in “It Was the Animals”, is accent. When she begins the poem, she starts off with lots of syllables, to then end the first bit of the poem with little syllables.
I appreciate the way Diaz writes each collection, first by setting out the speaker’s childhood scarred by racism and poverty. There is shame that comes from wearing a discarded Halloween costume and eating government raisins because need won’t make room for refusal. There is power and resilience that come from the same place: “soon we will give birth to fists.” The second section moves further into the speaker’s family and focuses on the brother who sets himself and all who love him on fire through his addiction and the mania that follows. The brother, “licking his sequined lips” and peering out the window from behind the curtain, is large and magnificent in this collection. He is a warrior, a rock star, a Judas with “one flip-flop slapping” but it is not his story that is told here. It is the speaker’s story and she tells it without any damper that might comfort the reader’s mind. The speaker has been exhausted by her own and her brother’s history “because tonight you are not in the mood / to have your heart ripped out. It gets old, / having your heart ripped out, / being opened that way.”
She also uses imagery in the poem of “It Was the Animals”, when she says “My brother — teeming with shadows — a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk, lifting his ark high in the air”, What picture do you see in your mind when you read this? You probably imagined shadows around her brother, the hull of bones, how bright the light is. Imagery in poetry creates similar snapshots in a reader’s mind. She uses words that you’re able to physically see, and these words are powerful when spoken because of the amount of syllables used and the cacophony used. Poets use imagery to draw readers into a sensory experience. Images will often provide us with mental snapshots that appeal to our senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In essence, images show us meaning; when we compare the snapshots in our mind to our own memories or experiences, we connect emotionally to the poem. Imagery can either expose us to new experiences or reveal our own experiences in a new light. Because most poems are brief, a poet has the challenge of creating an entire world for the reader in a few short lines, and images or even the story that arises from a series of images is the most efficient route to this communication.
Poets use sound in a variety of ways to enhance their poems. Here are some examples of sound techniques poets use to create mood, tone and images. Use the guide when you are interpreting poetry or selecting poems for choral reading. Poets organize rhyming words in a variety of patterns called rhyme schemes. End rhyme is the rhyming of words at the ends of lines of poetry. Internal rhyme is the rhyming of words within one line of poetry, but not all poems rhyme. Repetition: Repetition is the recurring use of a sound, a word, a phrase, or a line. Repetition can be used to appeal to our emotions, create mood, and to emphasize important ideas.
In conclusion, all of these poems use some form of imagery and sound devices. Imagery is evident in the poem “When My Brother Was an Aztec” when she talks about racism and poverty.
It’s very vivid, how she speaks in the poem. She uses the sound of repetition in the poem “It Was the Animals”. She used to word wood over and over again to show some sort of importance for that word. Imagery and sound devices are both used by poets to almost enhance the reading experience, to make the readers read it in a way they regularly would read a poem.