A Guide to the Understanding

of English Poetry

(Continued)

4.3 Personification

    Personification is a kind of metaphor by which an inanimate object, e.g. the angry sea, or an abstraction, e.g. Freedom, is endowed with human qualities. In the poem Spring by Thomas Nashe, when the poet writes “The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet”, he is personifying the none-human objects ‘the fields’ and ‘the daisies’ as if they possess the human qualities, being able to ‘breathe’ and to ‘kiss’. Personification also occurs when an abstract thing is spoken of as a person, as in the lines The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred.

    Here the abstract ideas ‘Death’ and ‘hell’ both have been personified with ‘jaws’ and ‘mouth’ respectively, thus being made cruel and fierce human beings.

In Thomas Gray’s Elegy—Written in a Country Churchyard,

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

Short and simple annals of the poor.

    The abstract terms "Ambition" and "Grandeur" are personified respectively as figures with ambition and with high social positions. This type of personification can also be regarded as synecdoche.

Sometimes a personification extends throughout the whole poem:

The Wind

The wind stood up and gave a shout.

He whistled on his fingers and

Kicked the withered leaves about  

And thumped the branches with his hand

And said he'd kill and kill and kill,

And so he will and so he will.

(James Stephens)

    In this short poem, the inanimate natural phenomenon “wind” has been given the human quality. It blows fiercely like a wild man, standing up shouting, whistling, thumbing, and saying "he'd kill and kill and kill".

    The effect of personification is very close to that of pathetic fallacy when human feelings are given to objects without them:

All around the coast the languid air did swoon,

Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.

(From The Lotus Eaters by Tennyson)

    In the two lines above, both the metaphor “swoon” and the simile “breathing like one that hath a weary dream” bestow feelings upon the air, an object that, by its very nature, can’t have them.