Sara Teasdale published “Barter” in 1917 as the opening poem in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Love Songs. The poem is an invitation for readers to enter into the aesthetic dimension of the world, to appreciate the beauty all around us. Teasdale accomplishes this task by conveying that beauty through striking imagery. “Barter” is full of rich images that often combine multiple senses at once in surprising ways.

Skills: analysis, drawing inferences from text, close reading, identifying the relationship between words

About This Document

The Owl Eyes Imagery activity gives students an opportunity to practice identifying and analyzing imagery. Imagery within a text creates a sensory experience that can connect readers to a text’s setting, atmosphere, or overall aesthetic. Studying imagery will help students understand how narrators or principal characters feel. The main components of this worksheet include the following:

• A brief introduction to the text
• A handout on types of imagery with examples from classic texts
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• Selected examples of imagery from the text

In completing this worksheet, students will learn to identify and analyze different kinds of imagery in order to develop close reading skills and identify the effect imagery has on their reading experience.