Published in 1916, Amy Lowell’s poem “Patterns” combines a traditional subject—a woman in a garden musing on her lover—with a subversive twist and an emotional depth that turns the premise on its head. Lowell’s narrator resents her restrictive dress and the conventions that confine her to the garden. She longs for a sexual and social liberation that, with the death of her lover, will be denied her. Her frustration expands beyond her own situation to encompass the rigorous societal expectations and behaviors that have sent her lover to his death. The rich detail of the imagery surrounding and encasing Lowell’s narrator contributes to the poem’s themes of oppression and confinement.

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

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.