Personification

4. Personification

By definition, personification is a figure of speech that gives human form or feelings to animals, or life and personal attributes to inanimate objects, or to ideas and abstractions, e.g.

(1) I ran across a dim photograph of him the other day, going through some old things. He's been dead twenty-five years. His name was Rex...and he was a bull-terrier.

(James Thurber)

(Here a dog is personified.)

(2) The wind whistled through the trees.

(3) If not always in a hot mood to smash, the sea is always stealthily ready for a drowning. (Joseph Conrad) (In (2) and (3) natural phenomena, the wind and the sea, are personified.)

(4) She sat like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief. (William Cowper)

(Here an abstraction, patience, is personified.)

Personification is a simple enough figure to recognize and to understand. It is easy enough to use too, except for one problem ---gender, or the grammatical classification of the thing personified as masculine or feminine. Should it be male or female, he or she? There is no problem with animals, where the sex is known, but objects and ideas would present difficulties.

There is no guide to usage here unless custom and personal taste could be considered guidelines. It is customary, for instance, to call ships she. Sometimes wind storms are given women's names, e.g. Hurricane Paula, Typhoon Alice. Poets and writers tend, too, to characterize various natural phenomena as male or female according to certain idealistic or romantic conceptions, e.g.

Feminine: 1. Nature ---Mother Nature 2. Earth ---Mother Earth 3. morning ---Aurora。daughter of the dawn (Homer)。 mild blushing goddess (Logan P.Smith) 4. evening ---the pale child, Eve 5. night ---empress of silence, and the queen of sleep (Christopher Marlowe)。the pale child, Eve, leading her mother, night (Alexander Smith) 6. the moon ---Diana, Luna, Phoebe。queen of heaven, queen of night (Shakespeare)。queen and huntress, chaste and fair (B. Jonson)

Masculine 1. the sun ---Helios, Apollo, Hyperion。 the god of life and poesy and light (Byron) 2. rivers ---the Father of Waters (of the Mississippi and the Irrawaddy, for

example)

For ideas and abstractions, however, the matter is a bit more complicated. Here personal taste or preference seems to play a more decisive role in determining gender. Justice, for example, is often depicted as a blindfolded woman with a pair of scales in her hands, and corresponds to the Greek goddess Nemisis. Death, on the other hand, is more often considered male, as in "that grim ferryman": (Shakespeare) and "Hell's grim Tyrant:" (Byron).

Times is also often portrayed as masculine, called Father Time, an old man with an hourglass, or, as in Ralph Hodgson's poem, an old gypsy man:

(5) "Time, you old gypsy man, Will you not stay, Put up your caravan Just for one day?"

Personification of ideas and abstractions was widely practised by classical poets and writers, and this may partly have been due to the literary fashion of the time and the strong influence of Greek and Roman mythology. In his poem "THE PASSIONS: ODE TO MUSIC" William Collins (1721-1759) shows this tendency at its extreme. Here almost every emotion is personified:

(6) "First Fear his hand... Amid the chords bewildered laid Next Anger rushed。his eyes on fire... Wan despair Low sullen sounds his grief beguiled, ... ...

And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair. Dejected Pity... Her soul subduing Voice applied, Pale Melancholy sate retired, And from her wild sequestered Seat... Poured through the mellow Horn her pensive soul. ... ... Last came Joy's ecstatic Trial, He, with Viny Crown advancing, First to the lively Pipe his hand addrest."

In this poem Collins treats Fear, Anger, Despair, and Joy as masculine, and, Melancholy, Pity, and Hope as feminine. It is hard, however, to see what justification he has for this classification other than personal choice and literary tradition.

Nowadays, the personification of ideas and abstractions is considered somewhat affected in prose or poetry and is therefore less practised. The personification of animals, objects, and natural phenomena is still popular, and when used with moderation and skill can add beauty and vividness to description, as the following examples show:

(7) Dawn was beginning to prowl about the sky and put out the stars.

(8) The ancient wilderness dreamed, stretched itself all open to the sun, and seemed to sigh with immeasurable content.