Poetry Workshop: Personification in Daily Life, Poetry, Literature & Music

I am continuing my Summer Poetry Appreciation Workshops at the Osher Lifelong Learning Program on the University of Richmond ( VA) Campus. In each class, I spend about one hour going over some poetry concepts and looking at some example works. During the second hour, students read their works and discuss how they came to be created. The other participants are asked to listen thoughtfully, ask appropriate questions, state what they like about the poems, and offer any suggestions about where they might be improved. In future columns, I plan to offer some of the poems created by the participants (including mine). In a recent class, I discussed the definition of Personification and provided some examples of where it is used in daily life and has been used in Poetry, Literature, and Music. We can define Personification as an element of speech or writing where an inanimate object or non-human creäture is given human characteristics. If we say, “the wind whispered in the grass, we are giving it the qualities of human conversation and suggesting that it can talk to and share secrets with the grass.

Other examples include: The flowers danced in the sunlight; The fire danced in the sunlight, and My car is a beauty, isn’t she?

In her 2018 Book, The Sun and Her Flowers, Rupi Kaur employs the device of Personification to suggest that hummingbirds can flirt with flowers; that flowers can giggle; and that bees may become jealous.  Here is an excellent sample of one of her untitled poems:

i live for that first second in the morning

when I am still half-conscious

i hear the hummingbirds outside

flirting with the flowers

i hear the flowers giggling

and the bees growing jealous

when I turn over to wake you

it starts all over again the panting

the wailing

the shock

of realizing

that you left

The Robert Burns Scottish poem, “To a Mousie..” suggests that the mouse is a fellow mortal of humans since the “best-laid plans of mice and men go aft’ aglay,” ( don’t go the way they hope).

Alexander Dumas discussed poetry and emotion in Chapter 111 of his excellent classic book, The Count of Monte Cristo:

• Though he had acknowledged his guilt, he was protected by his grief. There are some situations which men understand by instinct, but which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases, the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they had listened to an entire poem, and when the sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding the outburst as sublime.

In the above passage, we must assume that sorrow has its own human identity, that it can have vehement outbursts, and that outburst may be sublime. Afterall, only humans decide whether they think something is sublime or not.

In chapter 112 Dumas identifies several human characteristics of nature which he also used to set the scene when the Count returned to Paris after an absence:

• It was a lovely night—they had just reached the top of the hill Villejuif, from whence Paris appears like a somber sea tossing its millions of phosphorous waves into light—waves made more noisy, more passionate, more changeable, more furious, more greedy, than the tempestuous ocean—waves which never rest as those of the sea do, –waves ever dashing, ever foaming, ever ingulfing what falls within their grasp.

In that Chapter, many long kept secret dark details of the plot are revealed, thus the somber sea tosses “its millions of phosphorous waves into light.” Near the end of the story, the Count’s plans for Revenge on those who have wronged him are about to engulf all of those who fall within his “grasp.”

In the 1967 song, “Old Man,” Neil Young asks an old man to look at his life, “I’m a lot like you were,” he says. Both men have lost at love and paid “the cost.” The singer/poet, age 24, is asking to be granted “things “that can’t be lost, like a coin that won’t get tossed,” as he gets older and comes “rolling home” like the Old Man. In this verse, a coin is a simile symbolizing any treasure that we would like to hold onto that doesn’t change or fade away with time. To suggest that the coin might have the human interest to come rolling along with us on our journey of life is also an example of personification. This song takes on some added interest in 2018 when Young, now age 73, sings to audiences consisting of many twenty-year-old fans who are looking at the Old Man who was once the young man in the song.

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