Imagery is the use of figurative or descriptive language to create a vivid mental image. It involves at least one of the five senses: sight, hearing, feel, feel, and taste. This terrifies and worries the people at the masked ball. Poe's use of imagery, specifically the sense of sight, is to express the appearance of the figure of the Red Death. Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death" uses graphic imagery to offer a powerful statement about how death cannot be escaped. Poe's narrator describes the "Red Death" as having long devastated the country; “In fact, no plague has ever been so deadly or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal – the redness and horror of blood” (1). The image of blood and time throughout the short story also indicates corporeality. The plague may, in fact, represent typical attributes of human life and mortality by implying that the whole story is an allegory about one man's futile attempts to escape death. Poe gave a detailed description that it was to take place in one of the "battered abbeys" (1), isolated from the rest of the country where the people there are trapped inside while the people outside outside cannot enter. He wanted his readers to imagine: “A strong and high wall surrounded it. This wall had iron gates” (1). inside and out, had no possibility of escaping death caused by the plague. The sense of humorous irony is at hand since the Prince is locked in the castle with the Red Death. , which is why he locked himself in the castle in the first place. With the full intention of creating a mood of fear, Poe uses the scariest depiction of death you could imagine at the beginning of the story. .... middle of paper ......e the impression that Prospero represents Poe's image of the artist who insists on creating an ideal work of art, but who is permanently imprisoned by the time-limited nature of life. Poe emphasizes that the artistic effort to transform temporality into spatiality is doomed to failure. Even the seven coins, which suggest an orderly pattern of static placement, distort into a picture of the span of life as Prospero follows the Red Death through a temporal development from birth to youth to maturity, old age and finally death. . It is when Prospero must confront the reality of the temporality of life that he must inevitably confront the death on which life always insists. "The Masque of the Red Death" should not be dismissed as a simple Gothic horror story, but rather should be understood in terms of the aesthetic concept that dominated Poe's work..