The craft
Imagery
An image is not a decoration pasted onto a feeling. It is the feeling, translated into something the senses can hold. If the reader cannot see, hear, taste, touch or smell a part of the poem, you are still in the lobby.
What an image is
In ordinary speech, “image” means a picture. In poetry it means any concrete appeal to the senses — including sound, temperature, weight, and the body’s small humiliations. “I was sad” is a report. “I ate the toast from her plate and left the crusts” is an image from which sadness can be inferred. Trust the reader to infer.
Tell: I missed him all winter. Show: His coat still hungon the newel post, growinga darker dust.
Simile
A simile admits the join: like or as. It is honest, and slightly cooler than metaphor, because it keeps a gap between the two things. “My love is like a red, red rose” (Burns) is a simile so famous it has become furniture; notice, though, that Burns then spends the rest of the song making the comparison do work (June, melody, the seas running dry). A simile that stops at the comparison is a shrug.
Metaphor
A metaphor refuses the gap: X is Y. The mind is forced to occupy both at once. Good metaphors are specific and a little unfair. “The moon is a balloon” (e.e. cummings, more or less) is playful because balloons have strings, pop, and belong at parties — none of which the moon does, except in the poem.
Mixed metaphor is usually a mistake (“we must grasp the nettle before the ship sails”). Sometimes, in a comic or deranged speaker, it is characterisation. Know which you are doing.
Conceit
A conceit is a metaphor that refuses to sit down: an extended, sometimes outrageous comparison (Donne’s compasses in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”). Modern poems use quieter conceits — a whole lyric organised around one object (a kettle, a train seat, a voicemail). Commit. A conceit that lasts two lines and is then abandoned feels like a failed joke.
Metonymy and synecdoche
Metonymy names a thing by something associated with it (“the crown” for the monarch). Synecdoche names a whole by a part (“all hands on deck”). Both are more native to English than metaphor, which is why they often feel less showy. “The White House said” is metonymy you already speak.
Personification and pathetic fallacy
Giving human agency to the non-human can animate a scene or sentimentalise it. Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy is the version in which weather obediently mirrors the speaker’s mood: rain because we are crying. Sometimes you want that folk-song simplicity. Often you want the weather to disagree with the speaker — a bright afternoon at a funeral is more interesting than weather that behaves.
Synaesthesia
The senses borrowing each other’s vocabulary: a “loud shirt,” a “cold blue.” Used once, it startles. Used as a style, it becomes perfume. Make sure the crossed sense is doing diagnostic work, not merely looking talented.
The limits of “show, don’t tell”
It is good advice for beginners who summarise. It is poor advice for poems that need a statement (“I am not resigned,” “No one left and no one came”). Telling, after a sequence of images, can land like a gavel. Showing after a statement can prove it. Alternate. The poem that only shows may never know what it thinks; the poem that only tells never makes us believe it.
Images sit on a pulse. Take them to Rhythm, and decide whether they will chime in Rhyme or refuse to, in free verse.