Paints pictures using words. During the Romantic era, many people did not undertake extensive travel; therefore, most people would not know what a river flowing underground and then re-emerging sounded like. Coleridge uses sounds that might be familiar to everyone to represent the sound of the river. When he writes in the second stanza that “from this abyss boils with ceaseless tumult, / as if this earth were breathing with quick and thick gasps” (17-18), he is not stating that the earth breathes, but that the sound that comes from the abyss it was "as if... breathing". If instead, like the prose, he had written "...as if this earth were breathing with quick, labored gasps," the reader might have understood what sound was being made, but the poem would have given up some of its disturbing attributes. Removing this device would have created a more concrete world; however, it would also have removed the fairytale quality of the piece. The imagery is important because it allows the reader to both see the haunting “woman crying for her demon lover” and hear the “mighty fountain” (16:19). The metaphors Coleridge uses to describe the sounds of this dream garden add to the imagery that transforms the poem from the natural to the supernatural. Simile is not the only device used by Coleridge to make these words more suitable for poetry