Preview

Personification In Charles Wright's Little Apocalypse

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
616 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Personification In Charles Wright's Little Apocalypse
Personification: Personification is an example of figurative language in which nonhuman objects are given human characteristics or abstract ideas are presented as people by the author. Personification can make descriptions of non-human entities more vivid, or can help readers understand, sympathize with, or react emotionally to non-human characters. The connotative associations that are made with personified subjects allow for This literary device is an example of one the five principal tropes of literature and can be found in novels, poems, and other literary works.

Example: “The ground shudders beneath the ant’s hoof...the clouds assemble and mumble their messages. / Sedate , avaricious life. / The earthworm huddles in darkness, / the robin, great warrior, above, / Reworking across the shattered graves of his fathers. / The grass, in its green time, bows to whatever moves it” (3-11).

Function: Charles Wright’s fictional poem Little Apocalypse is a poem that utilizes the smaller segments of nature in a figurative fashion to illuminate the
…show more content…
The poem includes “the clouds assemble and mumble their messages” (6) and “the grass, in its green time, bows to whatever moves it” (11). The clouds must have been given the chance to “assemble” (6) and converge through the use of the same wind that swayed the grass. Personification does well to develop a sense of connectivity that all life has on Earth. Such examples are examples of personification namely because clouds cannot innately “mumble their messages” (6) and the ground does not innately shudder as an ant walks upon it (3). These non-living entities are given human characteristics in the form of sentiments and actions not natural to these entities in real

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The book Nanberry written by Jackie French shows, the lake of respect the white settlers gave the Aboriginals. ‘The warriors yelled a challenge again. The white ghosts laughed, then looked away. Colbee muttered something to the other warriors. They melted back into the trees, urging the women and children to follow.’ (p.3) Personification is used to describe how the aboriginal warriors disappeared in embarrassment into the tree’s/ after the white settlers laughed at them as they were powerless against them. The white settlers have no respect for the aboriginal warriors, laughing at them as the warriors yelled a challenge. As if they were powerless against them.…

    • 580 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the poem the author is describing how big Smokey The Bear hands are. “His paws are the size of catcher's mitts”(line 10). This is figurative language because it is a metaphor. It is comparing two objects without using like or as. The author uses this metaphor to emphasize to the reader the size of Smokey The Bear. After the reader is inferring that Smokey The Bear is about to set the forest on fire. “He is going to show them how a professional does it”(line 17).This is personification because it gives human characteristics to a non human object. The author uses this personification to make the reader see how huge this forest fire is going to be. He wants the reader to understand that Smokey is able to start a huge fire and that's exactly what he intends to do. Therefor authors tend to use figurative language to also convey his own idea and…

    • 465 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tikki Voluntary

    • 783 Words
    • 4 Pages

    To illustrate, Rikki Tikki fought Karait to protect Teddy even though it was dangerous (para 33). This proves that Kipling uses personification to prove the reason above because he gives human characteristics to Rikki Tikki by saying that Rikki Tikki had fought Karait to protect Teddy, but it is not possible in real life for a mongoose to kill a snake only to protect someone which proves that this is personification. This piece of personification demonstrates the theme because it proves that if someone cares about someone, they will face dangerous situations for the sake of their loved one. Furthermore, another example of personification would be when Nagaina had stopped what she was doing and yelled at Rikki Tikki to give her her egg back (para 91) Thus, this is an example of personification because Nagaina is ordering Rikki to give her the egg back whereas animals can not actually order others around. This piece of personification proves the theme because Nagaina only turned around to protect her egg from Rikki Tikki which means that the only reason she turned around was because she cared for her egg enough to forget about taking revenge. In conclusion, Rudyard Kipling uses the form of figurative language called personification to justify that if a person cares about someone, they will do everything they can to protect that person from any…

    • 783 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Figurative language allows readers to better understand the message that the author is trying to say. Personification allows writers to easily reveal what they are trying to say when descriptions fail them. By including personification, the author can clearly communicate how he felt at a specific time. As a reader, personification allows us to easier relate to the idea or feeling the author is conveying. Wiesel uses personification on page thirty nine, when he says “Remorse began to gnaw at me.” Remorse cannot eat away at a person, but it allows the reader to understand how guilty Elie felt when he did not stand up for his father. A second example of figurative language used in Night is foreshadowing. Foreshadowing allows the author to keep…

    • 353 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Douglas Stewart

    • 980 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Non-human elements of the natural environment are often portrayed with a sense of intelligence and worth. In nesting time, the proper noun use for the word “Nature”, emphasizes the composers understanding to nature being a living thing. The poet also feels that “Nature” is then associated with intelligence, consciousness and knowingness. Douglas Steward writes of natural things as if conscious and of equal intelligence to humans, referring to the bird as “ brave and wild”. The subject of the tree in Municipal Gum being addressed in second person as “you” reinforces the idea that the…

    • 980 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    An example of personification in the story is when Rikki says, “It must be the head,” he said at last, “the head above the hood; and when I am once there, I must not let go (para 57).” This shows the use of personification because the author uses the mongoose’s natural instinct to kill cobras and combines it with the text so that it seems as if Rikki-Tikki is thinking where to bite Nag. Another time when the author used personification is when the text states, “Darzee’s wife knew better than to do that, for a bird who looks at a snake’s eyes gets so frightened that she cannot move.” This supports the topic sentence because the author once again uses real live animal traits and applies it to the story in a way so that it seems as if Darzee’s wife has humanesque traits. This proves the theme to be true because if this had been a normal scene without personification, the bird (Darzee’s wife) would have just continued hopping away from Nagaina instead of contemplating on what to do. In conclusion, the author used personification so that the readers can digest the…

    • 738 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    It easily shows the reader a point of view. I used personification in my poem to show how something as simple or mundane as a patch of grass could flesh out the poem entirely. For example, the patch of grass “grabbed at my toes.” Without the phrase “grabbed…

    • 199 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Personification is a type of figurative language that occurs, when you take something that is non-human such as an object, a speech pattern, animal, or idea and apply human like qualities to it, in order to make a comparison. This type of figurative language is used in the poem "Caged Bird" by Maya Angelou when it states that "names the sky" for the sky doesn't have a name, but people do and so the sky has been depicted as a person through the use of…

    • 86 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The list continues with auditory imagery: “the birds taking back their language,” as though birds originally inspired all song and music and are angry because it has been taken for granted. The next line describes earthquake occurrences when “the cliffs fissure and collapse,” describing a world that falls apart because they people on it do not deserve the beauty anymore. The last lines of the stanza enforce more imagery to appeal to all the senses: “the air moves back from you like a wave” reminds the reader of the feeling of not being able to breathe. Everyone wants to believe that they are “one with nature,” but after relating so closely to the first stanza, the reader feels guilty for aggravating nature to the point of what is personified. This stanza is unique because the poem has not yet stated the reason for Mother Nature’s rage and the reader braces herself for what is coming in the third stanza, like a child waiting to be punished when she doesn’t know what she did…

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Personification: a type of metaphor that gives an inanimate object human attributes. Example: “The tree heaved with a sigh”.…

    • 651 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Personification and metaphors are similar in that they bother indirect comparisons. We use personification when we want to give something not human a human quality.…

    • 426 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Unexpected connections between a previously ordinary object and something that at first seemed totally unrelated can paint a picture of another context within which we can better examine our own existence (Hirsch). This is demonstrated quite well in A Martian Sends A Postcard Home in nearly every stanza, with the alien viewpoint of everyday things leading to considerable thought about the things we take for granted. The line, “At night, when all the colours die” is a particularly vivid way of describing day turning to night and implies the alien land must be either bright all the time or of another dimension where night and day have no meaning. Similarly, Poppies describes a field of flowers in terms that evoke the passage of life itself, with lines such as, “Of course nothing stops the cold, black, curved blade from hooking forward--- of course, loss is the great lesson” describing night falling, the death of a flower as it wilts and the blade of a scythe, invoking images of the Grim Reaper (Wu).…

    • 1009 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Sonnet

    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages

    I use a lot of personification in this poem. Using personification is dominant in the poem because I like to make objects come alive. Most of the personification is directed toward clouds in general. One example is in line three of the first stanza, which says, “They cry like they are teenage girls having a bad day.” Personification is also used in line one of the third stanza which states, “I hate rainy days, clouds why do you weep?” Personification was the main…

    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Despcition of Eme

    • 372 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Write an excellent example of personification (describing an object as if it’s a person), e.g..: The enraged (better than angry) sea smashed furiously (better than angrily) against the innocent rocks.…

    • 372 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    West Indian Poetry

    • 2294 Words
    • 7 Pages

    In the poem, “flowering rock”, personification functions as a device of art. The words used, creates an image within the readers head, this therefore, evokes the intensity of feeling in order to clearly understand what concept the poet is trying to exhibit. For Roach,…

    • 2294 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays