Personification (10.17.21)

Looking back through four years of blog posts from our ongoing W@1 projects, I'm surprised to find nothing about personification.  While we've done projects focusing on related figures of speech, nothing at all about personification itself, which is a form of metaphor and a close cousin to apostrophe, allegory and, the third "a," anthropomorphism.  So it's time for a project on personification!

This project came about last week as I listened to some of my colleagues at W@1 read poems with elements of personification in them.  Margaret's poem, "The Sun," is unabashed personification at work:

shirt pinned to rope drips droops

sun massages the day

uplifts the shirt

and prods AC to hum

In fact, her wonderful poem is a short history of how the sun has been personified by various cultures and civilizations, from the ancient Greeks to the builders of Stonehenge and, these days, to someone sitting in a Carolina yard on a warm morning.

June's poem, "Love Letter," is a classic apostrophe, a personal address to a thing (New York City), written as if that thing could listen and reply.  Since we've experimented with apostrophe before at W@1, albeit a while ago now, I'll just mention it here as a relative of personification--our project for this coming week:

Personification Project

Write a poem using personification, in other words, applying human characteristics to a thing or an abstraction (such as an emotion or an idea).  Don't confuse your effort with apostrophe; that is, don't address your subject directly as in a letter or a conversation.  (Margaret's poem, see above, is exactly the ticket here: it portrays the sun in third person, not second.  Nor should you try a first-person point of view, in which your "character" speaks directly.  More on this below.)  The idea here is to go for something a little more complex and nuanced, not for a poem that is cute or overly clever or too facile.  (Again, see below.)

Ancient literature is full of personifying.  Think Poseidon, Venus, Pan, Vishnu, the Holy Ghost.  Storytelling involves personification, as in Ovid.  Stories of animals or trees that speak, raise families, build houses and towns, govern and so on, are built upon personification and its sub-form of allegory.  Think Animal Farm.  Fairy tales and children's stories depend on personification for their power to teach lessons about character, good and evil, right and wrong, obeying your elders.

Personification has been employed to explain the unexplainable: eclipses, floods, earthquakes, war, birth, death and decay.  Omen stories often rely on personification.  It's a way of confronting and controlling our fears.  Personification has been used to control people: the horror stories we once told our children to get them to behave; the biblical tales that clerics tell their parishioners about heaven and hell to get them to behave.  The novelist, Richard Powers, just published Overstory, a novel about a community of trees meant partly to alert us to global climate calamity in the making.

There are degrees of personification.  A glancing kind, or a kind that merely suggests, lets the reader fulfill the human connection without resorting to too much detail: money talks, the debutant moon.  The most detailed kind of personification bends to allegory.  Think of the figures of Death we recount around this time of the year as Halloween approaches (Netflix & Turner Classic Movies are trending this sort of thing right now).

Somebody asked at last week's W@1 whether personification is different from anthropomorphism.  Well, not really.  Generally speaking, both concepts involve applying human characteristics to the non-human.  In practice, though, I treat personification as a tool of literary art--it's a non-subjective device.  Anthropomorphism, to me, has its agenda.  I haven't read it yet, but I suspect that Richard Powers' novel leans far into anthropomorphism.  Recently I read a news feature about scientific "proof" that trees "talk" to each other through the intricate root systems developed beneath any community of trees.  The idea of trees "talking" is anthropomorphic in a rhetorical way: somebody wants to convince you (and for the record, I am convinced) that forests are vital in and of themselves, not merely as "lungs" (another anthropomorphism!) for "our" planet, or as stock for our lumber yards.

About personifying from the first person point of view.  I'm asking you not to take this approach with your poem because the temptation for you will be to moralize instead of poeticize.  Using the first person, you surely will feel the pull of the anthropomorphic as I've just described it above.  I want you to remember that you're writing a poem here--that is, creating art--and not delivering a sermon.  Okay?  So stick with the third person, as Margaret does in her poem.

As for making "cute" or "clever," which to me goes too far in the other direction from anthropomorphizing, please avoid that as well.  Here's an example of cute that I've pulled from an old textbook: *

Hark to the whimper of the sea-gull;

He weeps because he's not an ea-gull.

Suppose you were, you silly sea-gull,

Could you explain it to your she-gull?

--Ogden Nash

That's just a bridge too far into the facile world of meter, rhyme and funny.  Not that your poem can't engage any of those elements, but remember that you're making art, not a greeting card jingle.  While your subject can certainly be humorous, your treatment of personification as a poetic device should be dead serious.

* Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, by Laurence Perrine.  Harcourt Brace and Co.: New York, 1956.