After finding out that Walter has died in the mines, Elizabeth prepares her home for the arrival of his body. The narrator uses imagery in this moment to bring readers more closely into the melancholic and dreary scene:
Then she lighted a candle and went into the tiny room. The air was cold and damp, but she could not make a fire, there was no fireplace. She set down the candle and looked round. The candle-light glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums, and on the dark mahogany. There was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.
The imagery here engages different senses—readers can feel the “cold and damp” air, visualize how “the candle-light glittered” on the reflective surfaces in the room, and smell the “cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.” All of these descriptions help readers feel and understand just how unsettling and depressing this moment is. Though candle-light sometimes has an association with warmth and ease, here it represents death and isolation, as Elizabeth seeks to build a larger, warmer fire but is unable to.
The description of the chrysanthemums' scent is especially notable in this passage because the title of the story is “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” While readers may expect, before starting the story, that this is a positive description—as chrysanthemums are known for their sweet and somewhat spicy smell, like cinnamon—this passage communicates that it actually has a negative connotation. To Elizabeth, chrysanthemums suddenly smell “cold” and “deathly” because she has just learned of her husband’s death.
The longer Elizabeth waits for the return of her husband, the more anxious she becomes. Here, the narrator uses imagery in order to capture Elizabeth’s nervous tension over four hours into waiting for Walter to come home from the mines:
It was a few minutes past nine. She was startled by the rapid chuff of the winding-engine at the pit, and the sharp whirr of the brakes on the rope as it descended. Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood, and she put her hand to her side, saying aloud, “Good gracious!—it’s only the nine o’clock deputy going down,” rebuking herself.
The narrator first uses imagery in this passage when describing the “rapid chuff of the winding-engine” and “the sharp whirr of the brakes,” helping readers hear the specific loud sounds that “startle” Elizabeth. It is notable that she is startled, of course, since she has lived by the railroad tracks for many years—she even chides herself for her anxious reaction, saying out loud, “Good gracious!—it’s only the nine o’clock deputy going down.”
The imagery becomes more poetic in the middle of the passage, as the narrator describes “the painful sweep of [Elizabeth’s] blood,” language that helps readers viscerally experience the aching anxiety moving through Elizabeth’s body in this moment. Here, Lawrence uses imagery in order to help readers understand the particular pain of a wife waiting for her coal miner husband to come home when, at the time, fatal accidents on the job were incredibly common.
