To analyse it, say what two things are being compared, what they share, and what feeling the writer wants. This guide shows the steps with an original worked example from our teachers.
What is imagery, and where is it tested?
Imagery is language that builds a picture or feeling in the reader’s mind. Some imagery is a comparison, such as fog that “crept” through the streets, or a crowd like “a tide”. Some is plain detail that appeals to the senses.
Analysing imagery means explaining two things. First, the picture the words paint. Second, the meaning or feeling that picture carries.
You will use this skill in several places. It appears in writer’s-effects questions on the First Language reading paper.
It is central to Literature, where poems and novels are built from images. It also helps your own writing, because a student who can take an image apart can build a better one.
Task wording and credit differ by board and syllabus year. We teach the current rules from each board’s official syllabus, summarised on our qualification pages.
Name the image, then take it apart
Suppose a writer says the moon was “a coin”. The reader may see the moon as small, flat, bright and hard. They may also feel the night sky has become cheap and cold.
That chain is the analysis: the picture, what the two things share, then the feeling. Naming the metaphor is only the first step. The marks are in what you say next.
A step-by-step method
- Find the image. Name the two things being joined: what is described, and what it is compared to.
- Say what the two things really share. A crowd and a tide share size, movement and force that cannot be stopped.
- Choose the shared quality the writer wants you to feel, using the rest of the passage as a clue.
- Explain the effect: what the reader now pictures and feels about the subject.
- If the image is part of a pattern, such as several images of light or illness, say how it adds to the larger mood.
A worked example from our teachers
The lines and the analysis below are our own original writing, made for teaching only.
The city at dusk was an ember, glowing faintly under a lid of cloud, breathing its last heat into the cold.
The writer compares the city to “an ember”. An ember and a city both give off warmth and a faint glow.
But an ember is almost finished, a fire at its end. The reader pictures a place that is still alive, but only just.
“Breathing its last heat” extends the comparison. It gives the dying fire a body and final breaths, which suggests the city is close to death. The “lid of cloud” traps the warmth, so the sky feels like it is pressing down.
One sustained image builds a mood of tiredness and slow decline. The flat sentence “the city looked tired” could never do that.
If this is where marks are going missing, a trial hour with an experienced teacher can work on it one-to-one.
Where students lose marks on imagery
The biggest loss is labelling without explaining. Writing “this is a metaphor” and moving on is not analysis.
The second is using the wrong shared quality. A student says a crowd is “like a tide” and then writes about the sea being blue, which the writer never meant.
The third is treating each image alone and missing the pattern. The fourth is retelling the scene instead of exploring the picture the words create.
One question fixes all four: “What do these two things share, and which shared quality does the writer want me to feel?”
Practising imagery analysis
Start by collecting images, not analysing them. Keep a list of strong comparisons from your reading.
Beside each, write the two things joined and one quality they share. This trains your eye, so you are not starting from nothing in the exam.
Next, practise in miniature. Take one image and write exactly three sentences: the literal picture, the shared quality, the effect. The tight limit stops you from only labelling.
Then run the skill backwards. Invent a metaphor for a rainy street or a crowded bus, and explain your own choice as if you were the marker.
How our teachers help in 1-to-1 lessons
Most students get stuck at the step between “what the two things share” and “what the reader feels”. They find the image but cannot say why it matters.
In 1-to-1 lessons, our teachers stop at each image in a rich passage and ask the same two questions until the answer comes quickly. We then mark your work and show which image you explained fully and which you only named.
This skill is central to our Literature in English tuition, and it also helps in the reading paper. To see how it works for your child, book a paid one-hour trial lesson. The teacher who would continue will mark a recent attempt with you.
Before then, compare your own work with the annotated model responses and try the practice tasks. Two related guides are comparing two poems and embedding short quotations.