These imaginative and enchanting poems breathe life into inanimate objects or abstract concepts. They personify nature, emotions, or even objects, giving them human traits and emotions.
These verses may depict the sun as a jovial dancer or the wind as a mischievous whisperer. Poets use this literary device to deepen connections with the reader, creating relatable characters out of the ordinary.
Personification adds layers of meaning, evoking empathy and understanding while infusing the world with wonder and magic through the lens of human emotion.
‘Human Life’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes a speaker’s frustration with the concept that there is no purpose to life or existence after death.
‘Human Life’ is one of the best poems that uses personification. The poem describes a speaker’s frustration with the idea that there is in fact no purpose to life, nor is there existence after death. The speaker meditates on what happens after one dies. Life is brief, a “flash,” and is then over. Coleridge utilizes a metaphor that uses personification to paint an image of “Nature” crafting a “vase” that is never finished.
‘Love’ was published in Eavan Boland’s 1994 collection In a Time of Violence. It speaks on themes of love, regret, and memory.
The poem begins with several images of a small, simple town. These are contrasted with those of a hero, entering into death. The speaker directs her words to her partner, telling this person about their lives together and how there are moments she wants to return to the past. Despite the basic surroundings, they discovered important things there. These include that “love had the feather and muscle of wings / and had come to live with us”. Love is personified as something physical and recognizable.
‘Magdalen Walks’ by Oscar Wilde describes the coming of spring and the vibrant, continually moving elements which herald its arrival.
This poem, on the surface, is simple. It is about the beginning of spring and its various elements. There are the trees and the birds, as well as the flowers, and they all need one another. The “pine-tree” is spoken of as listening to “whispered” stories about love. The tales make it “rustle with laughter” until it “tosses” its green leaves around. They all improve upon the land and seem to communicate via their various activities.
The little white clouds are racing over the sky,
And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,
The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch
‘The Parting of the Year’ depicts the Old Year as a departing lover, blending farewell sorrow with the New Year’s hopeful arrival.
Brémont describes a speaker’s fear of facing an unknown future in the coming year. The speaker describes how it is the last hour of the last day of the year. Brémont uses personification to allow the “old year” agency. In the second half of the poem, the afterlife opens up and calls to the “Old Year.” It is his time to move on to death. The final midnight hour is over and with a trembling sigh the “Old Year” vanishes into the “starlight.”
In ‘How happy is the little Stone, ’ Dickinson personifies a stone. She describes its rambling adventures, evoking joy and whimsy in the reader. The poem speaks on the crucial concept of happiness, where the speaker emphasizes how heavy the world can seem at times.
Within ‘How happy is the little Stone’ Dickinson speaks on themes of happiness, peace, and the purpose of life. A representative stone stands in as a symbol for ideal happiness and a perfectly aligned life devoid of stressors. This is a short yet charming poem that depicts happiness through the images of the stone. It rambles along the road by itself, it doesn’t care for human problems. The stone exists in the universe without complication.
In ‘Aspens’ Thomas focuses on the theme of grief and what role poetry has to play in the preservation of memory.
‘Aspens’ begins with the speaker describing the sound of the aspen trees. Thomas uses personification to describe the way they talk amongst themselves. This is implicitly compared to the way that poets or thinkers do. Then, just as poets, they are at the crossroads of life’s great choices. Here, they are able to call forth the ghosts of the past and fill the area with a gloomy representative of loss and grief, likely associated with World War I.
All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
‘Bluebird’ explores hiding vulnerability, revealing a tender heart kept secret, challenging societal norms vs. personal truth.
This poem uses personification, as well as other techniques like repetition and enjambment. ‘Bluebird’ describes a speaker’s relationship with his own emotions and inability to confess that he cannot always be strong and clever. The poem begins with a refrain that describes the existence of a “bluebird” in the speaker’s “heart.” It represents his kinder and gentler emotions. It is hidden inside his chest and there are only a few moments that he lets it out freely.
‘The Darling Letters’ by Carol Ann Duffy describes the way love letters transition from being full of devotion, to containing nothing by recriminations.
The speaker begins by describing how lovers from all different places keep and store their letters from the past. The letters are filled with various moments of emotional experience, some good some bad. She states that when one is finally ready to have the letters surface again, they come out as “sore memories blinking” in the light of the room. The writer of these letters will then be confronted by a version of themselves they are no longer familiar with.
Some keep them in shoeboxes away from the light,
sore memories blinking out as the lid lifts,
their own recklessness written all over them. My own...
‘I Looked Up from My Writing’ by Thomas Hardy is a existentially contemplative piece in which a writer is confronted with his own ignorance and irresponsibility.
At the beginning of the poem, a writer is startled by the presence of the moon directly outside his window. He initially believes the moon is there to see what he is writing but is soon proven wrong. The moon is personified, and “she” states that she out looking for the body of a man who killed himself by drowning. She is shrouded in the cloudy sky, slightly obscured from view. This lends a feeling of mystery to the poem while further expanding on the speaker’s use of personification.
‘John Barleycorn: A Ballad’ by Robert Burns unfolds nature’s sacrifice in vivid verses, celebrating whisky’s birth and Scotland’s cultural heritage.
The poem extensively employs personification by anthropomorphizing barley in the character of John Barleycorn. Barley's journey—from sowing to sacrifice—imbues it with human attributes, creating a vivid and relatable protagonist. This personification serves as a powerful literary device, humanizing nature and facilitating a deeper connection between readers and the allegorical elements woven into the poem.
‘Permanently’ by Kenneth Koch is a poem that compares the speaker’s love to the part of speech they view as the most essential.
Personification is a crucial element to Koch's poem and he uses it in a profound but whimsical way. Creating a love story between "Nouns" and other parts of speech that help signify the importance of "Adjectives" in language (especially poetry like Koch's).
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
‘Coming’ by Philip Larkin is about spring and how emotional its arrival can be. The peace, joy, and promise of spring rub off on Larkin’s speaker in a wonderful way.
In this poem, Larkin invests inanimate ideas such as the light with the ability to bathe the “Foreheads of houses.” The use of this device can also be found in the line, “Astonishing the brickwork.”
‘The Question’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley tells of a dream where the speaker visits a fantastic forest of pristine, blooming flowers.
Personification aids in transforming ordinary nature into an extraordinary realm where the speaker seems to interact with the animate natural world. For example, in 'gentle odors led my steps astray' and 'waters murmuring,' human qualities of scents and streams make them guides and companions. The copse 'hardly dared to fling its green arms round the bosom of the stream' seems to embrace it tenderly; these human characteristics, like arms and bosom, make it seem as if nature's elements are interacting emotionally. The tall flower that 'wets its mother's face with Heaven's collected tears' enhances the poem's ethereal aura.
Donne’s ‘Death, be not proud,’ rooted in the Christian idea of the afterlife, challenges the personified death, exposing its illusory power.
Personification facilitates direct address and makes the speaker's arguments more compelling, as death is depicted not as an abstract concept but as a boastful, misguided, fallible being. By calling death a mere 'slave' and attacking its supposed authority, the speaker effectively debunks the fear associated with mortality, presenting death as a help-aiding journey to another realm. Personification is complemented by apostrophe as the speaker engages in a rhetorical battle with the abstract death, which is absent from the scene.
Dickinson’s ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ captures snakes’ unsettling presence, reflecting fear and human vulnerability amid nature.
By personifying the snake, the speaker initially imbues it with familiarity and companionship, softening its potentially menacing nature. However, as the poem progresses, this personification evolves to reveal the snake's deceptive and threatening qualities. Personification creates a dynamic shift in the reader's perception of the snake, from a harmless acquaintance to a source of fear and unease, stressing the complexity of human interactions with the natural world while shaping the poem's tone and impact.
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