Our five senses are the primary ways we interact with our environment. Recreating those responses through vivid language can allow readers to easily enter the world of the poem. In "This is Just To Say," William Carlos Williams uses gustatory imagery, details that evoke a sense of taste, to describe the plums the speaker has eaten as "delicious," "sweet" and "cold." This imagery evokes an unapologetic mood; the speaker says he is sorry for eating food someone else planned to enjoy, but the sensory details reveal that he enjoyed it too much to be truly repentant.
Metaphors and similes represent two well-known types of imagery often used to create mood. In a simile, an author compares two unlike things using "like" or "as." In "Sonnet 130," William Shakespeare creates a satirical mood by using similes that go against a typical love sonnet; instead of describing a woman's beauty, he writes, "My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun." A metaphor directly makes a comparison without using "like." In "We Wear the Mask," Paul Laurence Dunbar creates a mood of deceptiveness when he uses a mask as a metaphor for our tendency to hide our feelings from others.
Just as musicians vary the tempo of a performance to create an emotional response in listeners, poets create mood through the rhythmical arrangement of words and phrases. Rhythm can be created through repetition of words, by varying the length of lines and stanzas and through the use of punctuation to start and stop the language. In Walt Whitman's "Beat! Beat! Drums!" the use of one syllable words evokes a measured, reverential rhythm, while Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" is written with the same meter as an actual waltz, bringing to life the speaker's memory of his father.
Aural imagery, such as assonance, alliteration and onomatopoeia, is the use of sound to establish mood. Assonance is the use of repeated vowel sounds to evoke a particular emotion. In "Ulalume," Edgar Allen Poe uses long vowel sounds to create a mournful, dirgelike mood. Alliteration is the repeated use of the same consonant sound in a line. Because it creates a playful mood, it often occurs in children's nursery rhymes and tongue twisters. Onomatopoeia includes words that imitate sounds, such as "crackle," "rumble" and "boom," which develop mood by evoking a particular sonic experience.