He paints pictures using words. In the Romantic era, few people undertook great journeys; therefore, most people would not know what a river sounded like that flowed underground and then re-emerged. Coleridge uses sounds that might be familiar to anyone to represent the sound of the river. When he writes in the second stanza that "from this abyss, seething with incessant tumult, / as if this earth with thick and fast pants were breathing" (17-18), he is not claiming that the earth breathes, but that the sound coming from the abyss was “as if… we were breathing”. If instead, like the prose, he had written "...as if this earth were breathing in thick, fast pants," the reader might have understood what sound was being made, but the poem would have abandoned some of its strange attributes . The removal of this device would have created a more concrete world; however, this would also have removed the fairy tale quality of the piece. The imagery is important because it allows the reader to see both the haunting “woman mourning her demonic 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 moves the poem from the natural to the supernatural. Simile is not the only means Coleridge uses to make these words more suitable for poetry than poetry.