What "personification" means

A term you'll meet in figurative language.

Personification is the figure of speech that gives human qualities, actions, or emotions to non-human things — animals, objects, weather, abstract ideas, even institutions. It is one of the most ancient and most universal devices in literature; every mythology personifies its forces, every poet personifies something, and every advertising copywriter who has ever written "your kitchen deserves more" is also using it.

Examples from across the canon

Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for Death — / He kindly stopped for me." Death is given a courteous personality and a carriage.
John Donne: "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so." The poet addresses Death as if it could feel humiliation.
Wordsworth: "The river glideth at his own sweet will." The river is given volition, even mood.
Sylvia Plath, "Daddy": "I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you." Memory itself takes on the personality of the addressee.
Tolkien: the Ring "wants" to be found; the Forest is "alive"; the swords of Westernesse "remember" old wars. Personification gives Middle-earth its moral weight.

Personification vs. pathetic fallacy

These two terms overlap and are sometimes confused. The distinction:

Personification is the broad figure — any attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing.
Pathetic fallacy (Ruskin's term) is the more specific case where nature seems to share the emotions of human characters — the storm rages with Lear, the sky weeps at the funeral. All pathetic fallacy is personification; not all personification is pathetic fallacy. See our entry on pathetic fallacy for the longer story.

Personification vs. apostrophe

Closely related: apostrophe is when a speaker addresses an absent person, an abstraction, or an inanimate object directly. The two often appear together — when Donne addresses Death, he is both personifying Death and apostrophizing it. The two figures are independent, though: personification can describe (the river glides), apostrophe is always direct address (O River).

Why writers use it

Personification does several jobs. It makes the abstract concrete: a "rising threat" is harder to feel than "a threat that crouches in the next room." It creates moral relationships with non-moral things: once nature has intentions, our actions toward it can have ethical weight. It compresses: a single personifying verb does the work of a paragraph of analysis. And it carries ancient resonances — to personify is to participate in the same gesture as the myths that gave us Athena, Loki, and Janus.

How to read it in context

When you notice that a non-human thing in a passage is being given a human verb — the city sleeps, the algorithm decides, the wind whispers — the writer is borrowing the weight of a human relationship to make you feel something about the non-human thing. Ask why that human quality, and not another.

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