Personification in Poetry

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Poets are very selective about the words they choose because they have a limited amount of space. Personification is one word play tool used by poets to add life (literally) to non-human things in their poems. This short video is a continuation of the last video you saw. It does a good job of explaining personification.

Personification- Personification is a figure of speech in which a thing, an idea or an animal is given human attributes. The non-human objects are portrayed in such a way that we feel they have the ability to act like human beings. For example, when we say, “The sky weeps” we are giving the sky the ability to cry, which is a human quality. Thus, we can say that the sky has been personified in the given sentence.

Examples:

The flowers danced in the gentle breeze. (flowers don't have legs so they can't really dance- people dance)
The fire swallowed the entire forest. (fire doesn't have a throat so technically can't swallow anything- people swallow)