John Keats wrote “Bright Star!” as he was journeying to Rome just five months before his death. The poem is a meditation on the North Star, which serves as a model of stability and endurance compared to Keats’s speaker, who wishes to remain forever locked in an embrace with his lover. In Keats’s usual style, he guides readers through a series of powerful sensory images as he develops his theme and deepens the poem’s emotional resonance.

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.