In a perfect world, I prefer to introduce literary devices with examples from popular music. These tend to be more accessible than the “legit” stuff and have the potential to be at least mildly entertaining. When it comes to personification, however, there’s a bit of a snag. Pop music simply isn’t a genre which utilizes extensive personification, and the examples which come up in your average Google search tend to be rather unfulfilling. Most are either obscure or the personification is so veiled or vague that it’s more likely to frustrate and confuse students than engage or enlighten them.

So, poetry it is.

That’s OK. There’s plenty of good stuff out there, and at some point we should probably transition our discussion of figurative language into more academic contexts anyway. Keep in mind that my goal at the moment is NOT to provide expert poetry analysis in a holistic sense. I’m just looking for ways to help my kids understand personification – giving human characteristics to inanimate objects or non-human living creatures in order to better express an experience or emotion.

We do this all the time in casual conversation without thinking much about it…

“This painting speaks to me.”

“That wallpaper looks sad.”

“The scale is mocking me.”

“Why does my car hate me?”

“My alarm really wants me to get up.”

With a little creativity, however, personification can prove quite poignant. Here’s an excerpt from “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” 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 –

“Death” here is capitalized and referred to as “he.” “Immortality,” too, is treated as a person rather than a concept. Death is apparently the driver of the carriage and in no particular hurry – a mindset which quickly rubs off on the narrator.

In this case, personifying Death helps remove some of the fear and uncertainty of the concept itself. Death “kindly” stops to pick up our narrator and conducts himself with “civility.” The use of past tense combined with the other passenger – “Immortality” – indicates the narrator is already in or approaching the afterlife, and while it’s not exactly a net positive, any horrors are intrinsic and eternal rather than shocking or temporal.

Once that’s established, the poem may be analyzed in whatever direction you like.

Death gets personified quite often in literature, all the way back to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (in the New Testament of the Bible, Amplified Version):

O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?

This personification allows the author to defy death and celebrate its ultimate overthrow. Paul could have simply written that “death no longer carries the same finality or creates the same sort of fear it once did thanks to this here new religion I’ve adopted,” but it really loses something that way.

Not that personification always has to be so heavy…

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.

We could debate whether or not the cow jumping over the moon counts as personification, but laughing dogs and eloping tableware definitely do. In this case, the only obvious purpose is fun – a perfectly valid goal even if we don’t talk about it much.

Let’s see if we can split the difference between confronting eternity fiddling felines. From “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

I like this one because most students can easily grasp that the “narrator” is a mirror. Like a person, it uses “I” statements – it swallows, it speaks truths and avoids cruelty, etc. At the same time, it’s difficult to put into words exactly what point Plath is trying to make or what “tone” is suggested. If we allow ourselves to really experience the poem, however, it definitely does make a point and provoke emotions – even if they remain just beyond the reach of rational description.

Sometimes literary devices help bring clarity to familiar feelings or situations; other times they help us reach out towards those things we simply cannot describe or explain in any other way. That’s part of what’s so cool about them.

Let’s go back to Dickinson for a moment:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all – …

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Before we consider the important stuff, let’s acknowledge that people don’t (usually) have feathers. An abstract idea is nevertheless being treated as a living thing, which – believe it or not – still counts as personification. (If that’s a stumbling block, feel free to recategorize it as a metaphor.) It really doesn’t matter, as long as we’re able to use what we know about personification (or metaphors) to better appreciate the work as a whole.

This one is slightly more tangible than Plath’s “Mirror,” but the figurative language clearly suggests realities beyond empirical explanation. Hope “perches in the soul” and “sings the tune without the words.” It’s difficult for even a heavy storm (one of the very common metaphors we discussed elsewhere) to shake or discourage it – yet it asks nothing of us to continue its “song.”

You could try to rewrite the same ideas in more practical language – “hope is good to have, especially when, like, it gets you through rough times by giving you, um… hope.” Even if we found a better way to express the substance, the intangibles are lost – the transcendent stuff we can sense and feel in the original even if we can’t reduce it to two-dimensional language.

I try to avoid going full “Dead Poets Society” with this sort of thing, but neither should we allow a strictly forensic approach to language to suck ALL the life out of these moments. Whatever else music, poetry, or literature is intended to do, it’s supposed to be stimulating – and not always in a naughty way.

Here’s another example – Elaine George’s short poem, “Snowflake”:

A fragile winter butterfly
Flutters from the sky
So soft and yet her heart
Is cold and made of ice
But if I warm it
She will melt and die

The personification here (which is actually “butterflication,” I suppose) seems primarily intended as imagery – to help us “see” the falling snowflake. At the same time, by instilling implied life into the tiny object, there’s a corresponding degree of pathos to the idea it could “die.”

Once we’ve established the concept, we can risk bringing in a few pop songs just to break things up. I might have overreacted a bit above – it’s just that I really hate most of the lists you’ll find online for this sort of thing. If our goal is to examine examples so subtle or so buried in other colorful language that it’s not even clear they should count, however…

From Don McLean’s “American Pie”:

I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside, the day the music died

From Fallout Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark”:

Burn everything you love, then burn the ashes – in the end, everything collides
My childhood spat back out the monster that you see – my songs know what you did in the dark
Light a mup-mup-mup – light a mup-mup-mup – light a mup-mup-mup – Iman FIYAHHHHH!

From Disney’s “Pocahontas”:

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountain?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

There are a few tidier examples, like Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”:

Will the wind ever remember the names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age and its wisdom, it whispers, “No – this will be the last”
And the wind cries, “Mary”

On the whole, however, popular music remains rather standoffish on this one. Well, except for one odd, but fairly common twist – personifying body parts.

From “Lyin’ Eyes” by the Eagles:

You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes – and your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes

From “Shhhh!” by Fleming and John:

Don’t tell my ears ’cause they’re not listening
Don’t tell my heart – it doesn’t know what it’s missing
Don’t tell my eyes – I know they won’t believe
That you’re not in love with me

Or the title number from “My Heart Says Go” by budding playwrights Matt Hawkins and Jorge Rivera-Herrans:

Disappointment – we avoid it – all for love in our parents’ eyes
Play along though it feels wrong and we give into a life of lies
Fires burn, tables turn, and I’ve come to learn that maybe it’s not for me…
What does my heart say? What does my heart say?
My heart says go! My heart says go!

You get the idea. Nothing overly complicated going on here, but this sort of personification gives a little extra punch the emotions and desires being expressed.

Finally, personification is sometimes just fun, or sweet, or otherwise purely aesthetic. In other words, while it can add meaning or depth, it doesn’t have to. Like any literary device or other figurative language, sometimes it’s there just to make things more interesting.

From “E Eats Everything” by They Might Be Giants:

A hardly has an appetite and pokes at food too long
And B can barely bother, because all the food is wrong
C likes only candy and chocolate by the box
D is just disinterested in anything you’ve got
But E eats everything – yeah, E eats everything…

I won’t ruin it by telling you what happens when they get to Z, but I assure you – it’s personified.