Heather Parr

Poetry Lesson Plan- Imagery

Title: Getting a lot out of nothing; an introduction to analyzing poetry

Introduction of target audience: This lesson is designed for a 9th grade mainstream
English class. The students are just beginning poetry, and they are in need of different
ways to analyze different kinds of poems.

Placement of lesson within larger unit: This lesson would take place within a larger
poetry unit. Students will have already learned different figures of speech (similes,
metaphors, connotation, denotation, assonance, etc). However, when learning the figures
of speech they were just identifying them, not using them to analyze poetry. This would
be the first lesson in which students are analyzing poetry, and in this case, they are using
visual imagery to determine mood.

Lesson Objectives (during this lesson, students will…)

1. Learn what imagery is and apply it to different mediums (paintings and poems)
2. Learn how to find images in poetry
3. Discuss how imagery relates to the mood of the poem

Materials: movable chairs/desks, PowerPoint and media to show it, chalkboard,

handouts of poems.

Preparation: Have students count off by three’s and form three groups which we will be
using later in the lesson. Do it at the beginning so we don’t interrupt the lesson to form
groups.

Introduction: Tell students that today we are starting our unit on analyzing poetry. Have
students look at an impressionist painting and think about what images they see and what
mood these images portray.

Presentation of Lesson
ACTIVITY #1: Images in impressionist paintings
1. Ask students to talk in small groups about and then volunteer their ideas about
what images they see in the paintings and what mood these images create. Stress
that there is no right or wrong answer, so people don’t have to be afraid of
“getting it wrong.” Write the different ideas on the board to showcase the different
meanings that people came up with.
2. Offer what images I see at the end of the students discussion of the painting and
what mood I think that it creates, or if there is a lull in the participation, tell the
class what images I see and ask them what mood those images might create.
ACTIVITY #2: Why and what
1. Ask students why I had them do this activity of looking at paintings.
(Often times with poetry, you are presented with a poem that doesn’t have a lot of
information in it, or the information is unclear, just like in these unclear paintings.
 However, just because there isn’t a lot of information or because the information is
unclear doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have meaning. You can get a lot of meaning out
of not a lot of information.)
2. Ask students for a definition of what ‘imagery’ is. Write student’s ideas on the
chalkboard so they can see them later when they are doing another activity. Go
over dictionary definition and show some examples.
TRANSITION: Now we’re going to take these concepts that we’ve been talking
about and apply them to poetry.
ASSESSMENT/ACTIVITY #3- The poetry
1. Hand each group a poem by William Carlos Williams. Show instructions on the
PowerPoint telling them to read the poems aloud in their groups, look for images
they ‘see,’ and discuss what mood these images create.
2. Showing each poem on the PowerPoint as it is being read, have each group read
their poem aloud to the whole group and tell us what images they ‘saw’ and what
mood these images created. Ask them to point to specific lines or words that back
up their answers. Open up each poem for discussion from the whole class. Do
people agree, disagree or have anything to add to what each group said?

Assignment: For homework, students will write a short (10-15) line poem in any form
they choose, in which they make use of visual imagery to create a certain mood. Also,
students will write a paragraph (1/2 page) in which they describe the images that they
‘see’ in their poem and why they chose those images to create the mood that they were
trying to achieve.

Adapted from lesson plan by Ruth Dunnan from Englewood Cliffs Upper School in
Englewood Cliffs, NJ