Imagery In The Masque Of The Red Death

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Blood gushing out of your pores? Sounds like something you would see in a horror movie, and that is exactly what Edgar Allan Poe wants you to feel. The Masque of the Red Death is written to show us that death is inevitable. The Red death slowly kills people from town to town until everyone is gone. He really hooks the reader with his gruesome descriptions, metaphors and ghastly imagery.

Poe introduces the setting and mood of the story by vividly describing the Red death. The Red Death is a fictional disease that is eliminating Prince Prospero's country. He describes this disease to be causing 'sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores', causing death within only half an hour. Sharp pains is agonizing enough, …show more content…
It was red, but it wasn't just described as red but 'scarlet—a deep blood colour'. The color scarlet indicates blood anyway, but Poe highlights the significance of it being the color of blood.

In this black room stands a clock. The author uses metaphorical devices to describe the sounds of the clock when it strikes at midnight. There came a 'brazen lungs of the clock', the word brazen means bold or without shame, this word is used to relate to the 'lungs' of the clock. Poe makes use of both personification and a metaphor here to add effect to the prominent sound of the clock.

At midnight, a new guest is seen wearing a 'corpse-like mask'. Here they are having this fancy masquerade ball when someone turns up in a Halloween costume, how rude! The new guest's vesture was 'dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror'. The word scarlet is used hear again, but now Poe writes that his face was 'besprinkled' with scarlet 'horror'. Scarlet horror means blood, and the word 'besprinkled' illustrates that the blood was splattered on the face, a way blood would spray on a murderers face in
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