Effective Use of Imagery in William Blake’s The Lamb and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man Wi :: William Blake Lamb Essays

Effective Use of Imagery in William Blake’s The Lamb and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings "Sailboats as big as cruise ships/ Glide gracefully across the ocean's glassy surface." Have you ever read a piece of literature and found it to be immensely satisfying due to the enormous amount of descriptions used by either the poet or the author? As the opening line illustrates what is happening at the beach, the reader is able to really get to know what the author is trying to explain. These descriptions are referred to as imagery. Imagery is used to give a detailed portrayal of a person, place, or thing. In the short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and in the poem, "The Lamb," by William Blake, both, author and poet, use imagery to depict to their audience their own perception of an angel. In the story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," Marquez first lets the reader know that, "the fallen body with mute stupor" (828), was an angel by writing that he, "couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings" (828). Much of today's societies first initial thought of a man with wings are to believe that this person is an angel. People have many different beliefs of what an angel is supposed to look like. Marquez, not wanting his readers to stray away from what his own personal view of an angel in this story, uses imagery to clarify his perception of the angel. Marquez notes that the angel has an, "incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor's voice," "he was dressed like a ragpicker," "huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked," "only a few faded hairs on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth," and most likely the most significant, "his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had" (828). Without the latte r details of the "angel", the reader would have the opportunity to use whatever they tend to believe and angel is. Marquez sets up the description of the angel to enable the reader to understand why the townspeople may have treated the angel as they had, "as if he weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal" (829). In the poem, "The Lamb," Blake uses imagery to explain the way the, "Little Lamb" (Line 1), looks like.