The bloodstain on Fidelis’ clothes
At the age of thirteen, Fidelis suffered a bloody nose, a stain of which his mother could not remove from his clothes. Despite several washes, the stain remains as a faint spot, “faded to a pale tea-brown and shaped like a jagged nest.” The simile employed in the presentation of the remaining bloodstain on Fidelis’ cloth enables an understanding of its shape.
Love
Fidelis says that he’d married Eva only because of a promise that he had made to his friend on his deathbed. However, he falls so deeply and irrevocably in love with her. In fact, the writer says that he had fallen via a trapdoor into "blackness — a midnight of love that had grown like a bower of inky twigs over the baby’s defenseless beauty, over Eva’s prickly loveliness, her trim fortitude, her bull-headed, forthright, stubborn grace.”
The loss of the gleaming streak in Eva’s eyes
Delphine expresses her deep admiration of Eva’s character as well as physical appearance. In her point of view: “There was, in one eye, an odd gleaming streak that would turn to a black line when the life left her body, like a light going out behind the crack in a door.” In this regard, the loss of the gleaming streak, perhaps, of life in Eva’s eyes on her death is comprehensible while enhancing imagery.
Delphine’s sobs
Cyprian is quite oblivious to Delphine’s feelings and emotions, particularly, as she treats him with cynical kindness such that whatever he does barely affects her, at least not intensely. However, Delphine’s emotions overcome her seeing her father’s helplessness (or his show of how he would be without her), and she sobs, her tossing likened to a storm: “Now the sobs were wrecking her, tossing her like a storm.”
The nests of the armyworms
The extent of the effect of the armyworm invasion is explicitly brought out including stunted wheat and bald in patches. The armyworms are thick and “their nests like the gray mesh in the trees.” The comparison of the nests of the worms to gray mesh is the writer’s approach towards enhancing imagery.
