“Ode on Melancholy” is one of the fives odes John Keats composed in 1819, often considered as a group to be Keats’s greatest achievement. In “Ode on Melancholy,” Keats makes a claim for sorrow’s place in human life, arguing that sorrow and joy always accompany one another. As is typical of his style, John Keats persuades by crafting imagery that evokes all of the senses and stimulates the imagination.

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.