Lecture 8
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05级写作 川外成都学院英语师范系 雷蕾 1 Lecture Eight-Personification 一、Definition：What's "personification"?
-- One way you can make your writing more interesting is to use "personification". It means to make something that isn't a person take on the qualities or personality of a person. It makes for fun stories. (You didn't think that the three little pigs really talked and built their own houses did you?) Personification is a writer's craft that gives an idea, object, or animal qualities of a person. Personification is also used sometimes to graphically describe something. For example:
The wind howled. The volcano belched smoke and ash.
We know, of course, that howling and belching is something that humans do quite well. When you use these actions to describe the wind or a volcano, it paints a wonderful picture with words!
The large rock refused to budge. (The word refused is something a person would do.) Practice: Underline the word that gives a quality of a person. 1. The sun stretches its warmth across the land. 2. The chair danced as the baby bounced to and fro. 3. The darkness wrapped its arms around me. 4. The moon is the queen of night. 5. Time, an old gypsy man, will not stay a moment. 6. The tiger was standing gloomily in his cage. Look at the words below. Try to give each word a quality of a human and write a sentence. frog _________________________________________________________ table _________________________________________________________ grass _________________________________________________________ 05级写作 川外成都学院英语师范系 雷蕾 2 night _________________________________________________________ 二、Personification is giving human qualities to animals or objects. Example: a smiling moon, a jovial sun
In "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath, for example, the mirror--the "I" in the first line--is given the ability to speak, see and swallow, as well as human attributes such as truthfulness.
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful-- In John Keats' "To Autumn," the fall season is personified as "sitting careless on a granary floor" (line 14) and "drowsed with the fume of poppies" (line 17.)
Poetry of John Keats (1795-1821) To Autumn Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; 05级写作 川外成都学院英语师范系 雷蕾 3 Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
John Keats (1795-1821), English lyric poet, usually regarded as the archetype of the Romantic writer. Keats felt that the deepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension of material beauty, although his mature poems reveal his fascination with a world of death and decay.
John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 (probably), first child of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings Keats, who had apparently eloped1. Everything was pretty ordinary for all concerned for a while--the Keatses had three more sons (George and Thomas, plus Edward who died as a baby) and one daughter, Frances, by 1803. That was also the year when John went away to school at Enfield. In 1804, John's father was killed in a fall from a horse. Just over two months later, for mysterious reasons, Frances remarried, to a London bank clerk named William Rawlings. Frances quickly decided she'd made some sort of terrible error and left, taking nothing with her since the laws of the time decreed that all her property and even her children belonged to her husband. Frances' mother, Alice, swept in and took custody of the children, but she could do nothing about the Swan and Hoop, which Rawlings sold immediately before disappearing. It was around this time that John became prone to fistfights, which he rarely lost even though he was small for his age2.
