Personification分析和总结分析和总结.pdfVIP

4. Personification By definition, personification is a figure of speech that gives human form or feelings to animals, or life and personal attributes to inanimate objects, or to ideas and abstractions, e.g. (1) I ran across a dim photograph of him the other day, going through some old things. Hes been dead twenty-five years. His name was Rex...and he was a bull- terrier . (James Thurber) (Here a dog is personified.) (2) The wind whistled through the trees. (3) If not always in a hot mood to smash, the sea is always stealthily ready for a drowning. (Joseph Conrad) (In (2) and (3) natural phenomena, the wind and the sea, are personified.) (4) She sat like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief. (William Cowper) (Here an abstraction, patience, is personified.) Personification is a simple enough figure to recognize and to understand. It is easy enough to use too, except for one problem gender , or the grammatical classification of the thing personified as masculine or feminine. Should it be male or female, he or she? There is no problem with animals, where the sex is known, but objects and ideas would present difficulties. There is no guide to usage here unless custom and personal taste could be considered guidelines. It is customary, for instance, to call ships she. Sometimes wind storms are given womens names, e.g. Hurricane Paula, Typhoon Alice. Poets and writers tend, too, to characterize various natural phenomena as male or female according to certain idealistic or romantic conceptions, e.g. Feminine: 1. Nature Mother Nature 2. Earth