Imagery is the expressions of sense experience impressed upon the mind of a writer through touch, smell, hearing & taste. An epithet, a simile, a metaphor or personification may create an image or an image can be presented in a phrase or passage conveying us something more than its face & value. In the poetry of John Donne , the leader & the first metaphysical poetry of English literature. We find images dissimilar and yoked by violence together.
The images in most of Donne's poems are certainly far-fetched. He has ransacked art &nature for illustrations, comparisons& allusions. in the love the poems of the Elizabethan period the images were mainly drawn from the mythology of the gods& goddesses & from the world of the nature. Moonlight , gardens, brooks &streams & valleys& flowers are the principal images of the love poems. But donne is not much interested in nature images& avoids gods & goddesses except when he is in petrarchan mood in some of his poems.so, there's amarked departure from the conventional love poemsof the Elizabethan in donne's poems in so far his imagery is concerned.
Donne was a learned man & so, a learned poet.he depended on his learning for illustrating his ideas. He makes use of the scientific speculations & inventions of his time to illustrate his themes. He utilizes fruits of the voyages of exploration& discovery of the Elizabethan age to give point to his ideas. He draws his images from medieval, philosophy, theology, alchemy, mathmetics, astrology, astronomy, anatomy, medicine, & the law. As aresult , his poetry, already argumentative acquires a still more intellectual character because of this ind of imagery. The average reader find him too difficult to understand because of his peculiar & comparatively unknown imagery. Besides, there is a queer mixture of the ordinary & serios images of the play.