"A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."
Do you hear the tune? Do you hear it as clearly as you can hear
"The tambourines
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens"?
In these lines the poet is trying to make us feel certain bodily sensations ("tactile" image):
"I closed my lids and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky, Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet."
Do your eyes feel that pressure?
You are sitting quite motionless in your chair as you read these lines ("motor" image):
"I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three!"
Are you instantly on horseback? If you are, the poet has put you there by conveying from his mind to yours, through the use of verbal imagery and rhythm, his "sense" of riding, which has now become your sense of riding.
If the reader can meet this test of realizing simple images through his own body-and-mind reaction to their stimulus, the door of poetry is open to him. He can enter into its limitless enjoyments. If he wishes to analyse more closely the nature of the pleasure which poetry affords, he may select any lines he happens to like, and ask himself how the various functions of the imagination are illustrated by them. Suppose the lines are Coleridge's description of the bridal procession, already quoted in part: