Personification — Definition and Examples
What is personification?
Personification is a literary device that gives human attributes to non-human things, like inanimate objects or abstract ideas. Using human qualities to describe inanimate objects allows writers to present more vivid and lively ideas, allowing their work to come alive (e.g., The lightning danced across the night sky.)
By providing well-known human characteristics to objects and abstract concepts, writers can make their descriptions relatable to the reader. The writer often wants the reader to develop emotional connections with the objects or ideas.
Personification is often grouped with or mistaken for anthropomorphism and zoomorphism:
Anthropomorphism describes something that is not human behaving like a human.
Cat in the Hat
Winnie the Pooh
Mickey Mouse
Zoomorphism endows non-human animalistic qualities to something that is not an animal.
Losing the competition to her best friend really ruffled her feathers.
Personification examples
Use of personification is not only present in literary works, as examples are prevalent in everyday speech:
I didn't sleep well because the thunder was clapping all night.
Time crawled as the meeting went into its third hour.
The wind angrily tossed my car from side to side.
It's been so long since I've been in the attic that the stairs groaned under my weight.
The menacing sky threatened to ruin our vacation.
Personification is often used in animated films and children’s books, where objects take on human emotions and characteristics.
Personification in literature
The following works of literature contain examples of personification:
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood:
There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently. . . . . It breathes, in the warmth, breathing itself in.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne:
But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare:
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, / Who is already sick and pale with grief, / That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Personification in poetry
Poets consistently employ personification in their works, giving them the ability to develop meaning using fewer words. Examples of personification in poetry include the following:
"Because I could not stop…" by Emily Dickinson:
Because I could not stop for Death– / He kindly stopped for me– / The Carriage held but just Ourselves– / And Immortality. / We slowly drove– He knew no haste / And I had put away / My labor and my leisure too, / For His Civility–
"The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll:
"The sun was shining on the sea, / Shining with all his might: / He did his very best to make / The billows smooth and bright — / And this was odd, because it was / The middle of the night."
"Hey Diddle Diddle" by Mother Goose:
"Hey diddle, diddle, / The cat and the fiddle, / The cow jumped over the moon; / The little dog laughed / To see such sport, / And the dish ran away with the spoon."