Emotion in Poetry: Personification

Personification is the providing of human traits to non-human factors that can not have these traits. Dogs can knowledge worry; thus, writing around a fearful dog is not personification. Clouds can not knowledge anger; thus, "angry clouds" is personification.

Writing a poem around a speaking cat may well have personification, Yet that does not imply the personification enhances the emotion of the poetry. For that reason, we will need to go additional in depth to comprehend how the use of this poetic device can and ought to help the feelings discovered in the poem. (Note: all poetry, unless otherwise noted, copyright 2005 by Vivian Gilbert Zabel.)

Writing around dark, towering clouds may well produce a feeling of dread, Yet appear what occurs when we use personfication:

The dark, towering clouds rumbled their anger
As they smothered the frightened sky in blackness.

Now the emotion - stronger, additional pronounced - catches our interest. Of course anger is an emotion, However getting the clouds exhibit the anger enhances it.

I frequently use personification in my poetry, nearly subconsciously, simply because it does add to the intensity of emotion: sighing tree branches, whispering winds, sleeping flowers, frightened sky.

The Chapel

Like a chapel on a rugged crag,

Its steeple pointing upward,

My life does not huddle protected in the valley

Beneath trees that maintain the blistering sun at bay.

Walls of stone slow not the energy of pounding wind.

No, my chapel fights to withstand the snarling gales,

Baking heat, and freezing chill, unshielded from attack.

However, as I gaze about me, eyes wide in wonder

At the panorama spread exactly where e'er I survey,

The view is worth the struggle, strife, and discomfort.

Exactly where else can I see what beauty can be discovered?

Unless I reside above the clutter, near the clouds,

Regardless of the storms that shake life's walls,

I would miss the majesty that can abound.

The path to my mountain top rated may possibly be steep

Over the jagged teeth of angry rocks.

However the trip merits the difficulty, the distress

Even if a towering tempest hides the sun,

For a rainbow will adhere to the rain someday,

Even if the storm wipes the chapel away.

In the preceding poem we discover a fighting chapel and angry rocks, each pictures giving a battle-kind emotion.

Personification enables the reader to sense far more of the emotion the poet tries to produce and share. Practicing the use of personification enables us to be much more proficient.

Vivian Gilbert Zabel taught English, composition, and inventive writing for twenty-5 years, honing her abilities as she studied and taught. She is a author on Writers ( http://www.Writing.Com/ ), and her portfolio is http://www.Writing.Com/authors/vzabel. Her books, Hidden Lies and Other Stories and Walking the Earth, can be located via Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com.