When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table

T.S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

Wallace Stevens “The Motive for Metaphor”

Dear SunWinkers:

Two years ago, my third column for Gather was on the topic of personification. So far, going back to my old columns isn’t giving me much of a head start. Oh, well! I must have had a lot to learn back then.

Personification is the assignment of human qualities to an animal, an inanimate object, even an abstract concept. To wit, Emily Dickinson’s

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…

Assigning human qualities to an object tells us something poetically about that object. In our example, Dickinson’s poem tells us something about death. She could have just said, “Death is patient.” Giving us the image of Death as a kindly carriage driver lets us to relate to her thesis on a personal level and experience it in a visceral, sensuous way. Death didn’t show up at the door in a black hoodie holding a scythe. Death didn’t throw a bag over her head and toss her into the back seat. Death opened the carriage door, smiled kindly, and invited her in. What does that say about death?

Before you read on, ask yourself that question. There is no one right answer. We bring ourselves to the act of reading, and that’s where poetry lives, in the dynamism, the connection, between poet and reader. Put yourself in the place of the narrator. A carriage pulls up and stops, opens the door. It’s Death, smiling softly. What are you feeling right now?

My weird little thought is that, on the most obvious level, Death is patient. Death is kind. It sounds like St. Paul’s description of love in 2 Corinthians, doesn’t it? Hmm…

I led today’s column with a couple examples from last week’s simile column. A poetic figure does not have to be just one thing. That can be an easy thing to forget as you’re responding to this prompt and asking yourself, “How the heck am I going to work a personification into this turkey?”

Personification isn’t limited to talking dogs. That’s anthropomorphism. That is one type of personification, but there are many others. As we’ve just seen, the thing personified can be an abstract concept. Another example of this is the Dylan Thomas line from “Fern Hill”: “Time held me green and dying/though I sang in my chains…” Time, an abstraction, is doing something physical and purposeful to the narrator.

Referring to one’s work-in-progress as a “turkey,” as I just did, is yet another type; the turkey is an animate being with certain symbolic, commonly understood behavioral qualities. You can personify something inanimate by comparing it to anything animate, not just a human being. “Love is a dog from hell,” writes Charles Bukowski. To personify something is to imbue it with animation, purpose, and personality.

Billy Collins has a delightful gift for personification:

a pale bachelor, well-groomed and
full of melancholy
his round mouth open
as if he had just broken into song.

“The Man In The Moon”

In the morning when I found History
snoring heavily on the couch…

“The Lesson”

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

“Introduction to Poetry”

A couple more random examples:

An Indian pony crosses the plains
whispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas.

James Tate, “The Wheelchair Butterfly”

A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened.

Gertrude Stein, “Celery” from Tender Buttons

Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The pennycandystore beyond the El…”

Stripped the lower limbs
From our overgrown blue spruce.
It screamed like a girl.

DW “Haiku”

 

The Prompt

Study the examples. Then write a short to medium-length poem, or prose poem, or piece of flash fiction, incorporating at least one instance of personification. It will probably be a better writing exercise if you choose something unexpected to personify, as opposed to, say, a dog or a cat.

Love,

Doug

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