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Personification

Rhetorical Devices
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Personification attributes human qualities, actions, feelings, or intentions to animals, objects, natural forces, or abstract ideas. It makes nonhuman or intangible subjects appear animate and emotionally expressive.

Detailed Definition
Personification turns the world of things and ideas into a field of human-like action: wind may whisper, winter may threaten, and sorrow may sit beside a speaker. The device helps poetry translate abstract states and impersonal forces into images readers can see and feel. It can create intimacy with nature, intensify atmosphere, or reveal how a speaker interprets the world through emotion. By giving a nonhuman subject recognizable motives or gestures, personification makes complex experiences more immediate without claiming that the subject is literally human.
Example
Example in poetry:
“The wind whispered through the reeds,” giving the wind a human action; “The jealous sun hid behind a cloud,” attributing emotion to the sun; “Death knocked softly at the door,” representing an abstraction as a visitor; “In William Wordsworth’s poem, the daffodils ‘fluttering and dancing’ behave like living celebrants”
Additional Notes
Personification helps readers relate to abstractions and natural forces by presenting them as agents with motives or feelings. Distinguish it from apostrophe, in which a speaker directly addresses an absent person, object, or abstraction.
Other Meanings of “Personification”
Also Known As
Animation of the Inanimate Humanizing Trope Giving Human Qualities Anthropomorphism
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