Personification

Personification attributes human actions, feelings or intentions to an object, an animal, a place or an abstract idea: 'the house had given up years ago'.

The house had given up years ago. Houses do not give up. The sentence assigns a human act of surrender to a building, and in doing so says something about it that the house was derelict does not: somebody once tried.

Personification examples

• Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun. Keats, To Autumn. Why it works: autumn and the sun become two friends working together, and the harvest becomes something they planned.
• The car coughed, thought about it, and started. Why it works: the reader hears the engine and feels the driver's relief in eight words.
• The fridge hummed its one opinion all night. Why it works: a small joke that tells us the narrator is lying awake.
• The city never sleeps. Why it is dead: so familiar it no longer makes a picture. Fine in speech, weak in narration.

It is a species of metaphor, and the same cautions apply. Dead personifications like time flies, the economy is struggling and the wind bit are ordinary vocabulary and cost nothing. Live ones are conspicuous and need to earn the attention they take.

Personification as characterisation

The craft use most worth knowing is in close narration. What a character personifies, and how, describes the character rather than the thing. A frightened narrator finds intent in the furniture. An exhausted one finds tiredness in the weather. A cheerful one does neither. Used this way, personification is a form of interiority, carried out entirely in the description of a room.

The wardrobe had been waiting for her all evening. She could feel it deciding.

Why it works: nothing happens, and we know exactly how scared she is.

Personification vs apostrophe

Personification describes a thing as human. Apostrophe speaks to it: Wardrobe, stay shut. The two often travel together, since talking to a thing assumes it can hear.

Common mistakes

• Everything is alive. The trees whispered, the moon watched, the road hurried away. A landscape where everything has intentions is purple prose, and it empties the device: if the whole world has feelings, none of them mean anything. Keep one.
• The wrong feeling. A grieving character who notices cheerful curtains had better be noticing them on purpose. Match the personification to the mood, or make the mismatch the point.
• Mixed signals. A storm that raged in one sentence and sulked in the next is two characters. Pick one.

Frequently asked questions

What is personification?

Personification is a figure of speech that gives human qualities to something that is not human, such as 'the wind howled' or 'time flies'. It is a kind of metaphor: the thing is described as if it were a person.

What are some examples of personification?

Everyday ones include 'the car coughed into life', 'the city never sleeps' and 'opportunity knocked'. In poetry, Keats addresses autumn as the 'close bosom-friend of the maturing sun'.

What is the difference between personification and anthropomorphism?

Personification is a figure of speech: the wind does not really howl, it only sounds that way. Anthropomorphism is when a non-human character actually behaves like a person in the story, such as a rabbit who talks and wears a waistcoat.