TOPIC: Literary Devices

SUBTOPIC: Personification
• OBJECTIVES:
Clearly, define the literary
term: personification.
• Accurately, identify personification in
various extracts

• Personification gives human traits and qualities, such as emotions, desires,

sensations, gestures, and speech emotions, often by way of a metaphor.
Personification is a figure of speech in which an idea or thing is given
human attributes and/or feelings or is spoken of as if it were human.
Personification is a common form of metaphor in that human
characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things. This allows writers to
create life and motion within inanimate objects, animals, and even abstract
ideas by assigning them recognizable human behaviors and emotions.

• Example: 1.My heart danced when he walked in the room.

2. The hair on my arms stood after the performance.

• 3. Why is your dog pouting in the corner?

4. The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care.
Activity:

Instructions – Identify the personifications in the various extracts.

Example: “Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just ourselves –

And Immortality.”
“Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson
Death is personified as a person driving a carriage. Within the confines of this poem, Death may in fact be a person; but Dickinson
isn’t writing about a literal event that happened to her. She’s using her relationship with Death figuratively, illustrating how Death
goes about its business with little regard for humanity’s work and leisure.
Find the personification in each exercise:
1.“Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milk bottle, flattening their sides.”
- “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath
2. "You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it You
start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes You're
paralyzed
Cause this is thriller, thriller night
And no one's gonna save you from the beast about to strike."
- "Thriller" by Michael Jackson
3.TITANIA: No night is now with hymn or carol blessed. Therefore, the
moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare)
4.When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright
coins from his purse

o buy me, and snaps the purse shut...

I want to step through the door full of
curiosity, wondering: what is it going
to be like, that cottage of darkness?
(“When Death Comes” by Mary
Oliver)
ANSWER SHEET

1. Plath makes a direct comparison between blackberries and humans—she says

blackberries, like eyes, are 'dumb,' in that they cannot speak. But we also know that
they can’t squander, they can’t be a sisterhood, and they can’t love or accommodate
themselves. Plath isn’t trying to tell us that these are magic blackberries with all
those traits. She’s using personification to illustrate her relationship with these
blackberries, demonstrating a unique bond with them. Even without the context
of the whole poem, Plath’s use of personification shows us that these blackberries
aren’t just fruit to her.
2. There are a few examples of personification in this song—in just this verse, terror
"takes the sound" and horror "looks you right between the eyes." Logically, we
know that emotions can't take or look at anything. But using that kind of language to
describe fear gives it an agency that infuses this song with energy. It's not difficult to
understand why this works so well; if you've ever been afraid, you know how it can
affect the way your body feels, sometimes paralyzing you. That's what Jackson is
tapping into in this song: the sense that fear can trap you and make you feel
like you're out of control.
3. In this example of personification, Shakespeare uses
the concept of the moon as a character. The moon is
feminized (as often it is in literature, if given a
gender) and said to be a governess of floods. The
color of the moon lends to the depiction of “her
anger” and she is said to cause more disease to
spread due to her displeasure. Shakespeare thus gives
the moon new descriptive qualities, emotions, and
motivation.
4. Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes” uses
several different ways to describe death. She
begins here with the image of death as a hungry
bear. Then Oliver gives death the human
characteristics of having money and wanting to
make a purchase, thereby personifying it. Thus,
death is full of desire in this poem. Oliver uses this
concept to contrast her own desire to live her life
as fully as possible before death comes for her.
GOOD LUCK