Read the following passage and answer the question.

disease infects fruit blossoms in our land,
disease infects our herds of grazing cattle,
makes women in labour lose their children.
and deadly pestilence, that fiery god,
swoops down to blast the city, emptying
the house of cadmus, and fills back hades
with groans and howls.

how would you describe the imagery of this section?

It is important to understand first what imagery is in poetry, so that we can look for it and reflect on it. Imagery is literally the elements used in a poem that seek to touch the senses and emotions of a person so that they can connect with the message of the text. It helps a reader to see in his/her mind what the author is painting through his words. Words, then, become almost like the brush of a painter and give the reader the image of what is being portrayed. In this passage, the imagery is a dark one, of despair and sadness. It paints through the word disease, which is repeated several times, a picture of devastation that affects all the levels of life within the speaker´s world. And then, the imagery gets even darker, when the poet uses words like deadly pestilence and claims it to be as powerful as a god, something that cannot be turned away or run from, which devastates the cities and countryside alike (this is known by the image offered when the poet mentions the House of Cadmus). In the end, the result of disease comes to be even darker, leading to death decay and hell itself, where even more pain awaits, this underlined by the use of words like Hades, and groans and howls.

quite an interesting way to teach topic sentences, because the answer to this question is the best definition of a topic sentence that one can present, it is as if answering the questions taught you how to do it, this is some real teaching, it is terribly well-done.

the topic sentence in this paragraph is:

topic sentences writers stay on track and keep a paragraph from becoming an aimless collection of sentences about an idea.

which incidentally tells you what a topic sentence should be.

in the quotation from passage, connie willis states that literature is a way for authors from the past to communicate with readers of today. we can read their stories, books, and other texts to learn lessons about life. willis refers to these lessons as messages “from beyond the grave.” willis has a favorable viewpoint about the timelessness of literature.