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Idioms
Definition of Imagery
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Swept Away in Time:
This passage from Chapter 2 contains vivid visual imagery that describes the contrast between the natural and urban environments in London. It also outlines and foreshadows the rapid changes to London currently happening and still to come:
One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and palms—it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace. These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would rise upon their site, as humanity piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Clap of Thunder:
In Chapter 4, Forster uses a combination of simile, metaphor, and auditory imagery to compare Helen's sudden infatuation with the Wilcoxes of Howards End to a "thunder clap.” This outlines the suddenness and intensity of her feelings:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...] Helen was a more serious patient. New ideas had burst upon her like a thunder clap, and by them and by their reverberations she had been stunned.
The truth was that she had fallen in love, not with an individual, but with a family.
Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Pale Cast of Thought:
In Chapter 8 of Howards End Margaret Schlegel grapples with the moral dilemma of breaking off her friendship with the Wilcoxes. She tries to do so for the sake of her sister Helen's happiness. The imagery used in this passage highlights the purity of Margaret's intentions, despite the potential social consequences of cutting off Mrs. Wilcox:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The letter that she wrote Mrs. Wilcox glowed with the native hue of resolution. The pale cast of thought was with her a breath rather than a tarnish, a breath that leaves the colours all the more vivid when it has been wiped away.
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Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—The Internment:
In Chapter 11, the woodcutter observing Mrs. Wilcox's funeral in the churchyard muses on the majesty of the scene and then departs, leaving the lonely grave. Forster employs visual imagery and the metaphor of a ship to describe the scene of this burial:
Unlock with LitCharts A+After him came silence absolute. [...] Hour after hour the scene of the interment remained without an eye to witness it. Clouds drifted over it from the west; or the church may have been a ship, high-prowed, steering with all its company towards infinity.
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Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Mrs. Wilcox's Death:
Margaret is overwhelmed by Mrs. Wilcox's death in Chapter 12. Forster uses the metaphor of bodies of water and the visual imagery of the ocean to describe the importance of the Wilcoxes' presence in Margaret's life:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation.
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Explanation and Analysis—Oxford:
In this passage from Chapter 12 the author depicts Tibby Schlegel’s reaction to Oxford University, where he is going to take a scholarship exam. Forster makes use of allusion, visual and tactile imagery, and personification to give a sense of place for the reader:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The august and mellow university, soaked with the richness of the western counties that it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy’s taste: it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood it all the better because it was empty. Oxford is—Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another: such at all events was to be its effect on Tibby.
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Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Chelsea Embankment:
In this passage from Chapter 15, Forster employs romantic visual imagery to describe the Chelsea Embankment, a landscaped walkway along the Thames river. As the Schlegel sisters walk along it, the author conveys a situationally ironic moment where the Schlegels' English and European identities clash:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The lamps and the plane-trees, following the line of the embankment, struck a note of dignity that is rare in English cities. The seats, almost deserted, were here and there occupied by gentlefolk in evening dress, who had strolled out from the houses behind to enjoy fresh air and the whisper of the rising tide. There is something Continental about Chelsea Embankment. It is an open space used rightly, a blessing more frequent in Germany than here.
Chapter 19
Explanation and Analysis—England was Alive:
Helen's musings about England in Chapter 19 weave a rich tapestry of imagery and metaphor. Forster evokes the country’s natural majesty and personifies its geography:
Unlock with LitCharts A+England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls [...] For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?
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Explanation and Analysis—Swelling Imagination:
In this passage from Chapter 1, Forster’s narrator employs visual imagery and oceanic similes and metaphors to depict the overwhelming experience of looking at England from afar:
Unlock with LitCharts A+How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
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Chapter 20
Explanation and Analysis—Flux of London:
In this passage from Chapter 20 Margaret expresses her distaste for the city of London and its constant movement and change. She uses vivid imagery to compare London to a river, rushing forward relentlessly and formlessly:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst—eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away—streaming, streaming for ever. That’s why I dread it so. I mistrust rivers, even in scenery. Now, the sea—
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Explanation and Analysis—Inner Life:
The motif of the "inner life" as it relates to interpersonal connection appears regularly throughout Howards End. In Chapter 20, when Margaret and Henry Wilcox are walking together, the narrator makes the following observation about Henry’s understanding of his wife:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He supposed her “as clever as they make ’em,” but no more, not realizing that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.
And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.
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Chapter 22
Explanation and Analysis—Inner Life:
The motif of the "inner life" as it relates to interpersonal connection appears regularly throughout Howards End. In Chapter 20, when Margaret and Henry Wilcox are walking together, the narrator makes the following observation about Henry’s understanding of his wife:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He supposed her “as clever as they make ’em,” but no more, not realizing that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.
And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.
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Chapter 23
Explanation and Analysis—A Comrade:
In Chapter 23 of Howards End, the wych-elm tree on the estate is personified and described with intense and paradoxical visual language. Through this, it seems to embody the English life Margaret Schlegel desires, as it makes the tree seem friendly and the house welcoming:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these rôles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air. It was a comrade. House and tree transcended any similes of sex. [...] [T]o compare either to man, to woman, always dwarfed the vision. Yet they kept within limits of the human.
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Explanation and Analysis—Wilcox Estate:
In Chapter 23, when Margaret arrives at the Wilcox estate by herself for the first time, the scene features vivid visual and tactile imagery as well as simile and metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Then the car turned away, and it was as if a curtain had risen. [...] Tulips were a tray of jewels. She could not see the wych-elm tree, but a branch of the celebrated vine, studded with velvet knobs, had covered the porch. She had seldom been in a garden where the flowers looked so well, and even the weeds she was idly plucking out of the porch were intensely green.
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Chapter 43
Explanation and Analysis—Life was a Deep River:
In Chapter 43 after the tragic accident with Leonard Bast, Margaret mourns for him and reflects on the nature of life and death. She does so through a series of metaphors and images that stack on top of each other. This language is powerful, varied, and sometimes contradictory, which reflects Margaret's complex emotional state:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king. Ah, no; there was beauty and adventure behind, such as the man at her feet had yearned for; there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the limits that fetter us now.
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