What are some imagery statements from "The Devil and Tom Walker?"

, as the name
implies, is a description in accordance with human senses, often with emphasis upon certain
details or interpretations which associate the imagery with emotion. The same scene, depending
upon the author's attentions, can be described differently according to the mood the author
wishes to set.

Many of Irving's stories use imagery to tell us about his
;

A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the
bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the
ragged beds of pudding stone, tantalized and balked his hunger; and sometimes he would lean his
head over the fence, look piteously at the passer by, and seem to petition deliverance from this
land of famine.

Through this imagery, we may understand
thatis not the best of men, neither responsible nor successful. We might have simply been told
this, but the details of this imagery, particularly (in my opinion) the horse's ribs, convey a
sense of pity and sympathy for the animal; we are already disposed to find Tom Walker unlikable.

Like most short cuts, it was an ill chosen route. The
swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high;
which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighbourhood. It was full
of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses; where the green surface often
betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant
pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water snake, and where trunks of pines
and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping in the
mire.

Irving tells us, and then shows us, that the path
through the swamp was a poor choice. Rather than saying that it was difficult to walk through,
disgusting, or dangerous, he articulates it as a problem made evident merely by observing it.

The imagery diminishes later in the story, and is replaced by dialogue. This
is largely because the scenes and character personalities do not change significantly once
introduced, and it is assumed that the reader recalls the mood as painted by the imagery; when
Tom talks to , we know he is in a gloomy swamp, and we don't need to be reminded of it each
time.