42. Close read by personification

42. Close read by personification: (poetry analysis paper)

-Personification is a figure of speech that endows animals, ideas, abstractions, and inanimate objects with human characteristics. For example, Autumn is personified as “conspiring” and capable of friendship in John Keats' poem "To Autumn" in the following lines, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness / Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;" (lines 1-

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

Example of a close read by personification in an analysis on "To Autumn":

In John Keats’s poem “To Autumn” the speaker personifies the fall season in order to indicate fall’s intentions. Allowing fall to think and “conspire” brings the reader closer to thinking like fall. In the opening lines of the ode, the speaker says:

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;

(lines 1-6).

In these opening lines of the ode the speaker directly refers to autumn in an apostrophe, as if autumn could respond. In essence, the speaker claims that autumn works with the sun to fill the fruits and vines to the brim with energy. The personification of autumn in the lines “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless” is significant because it allows autumn to have a friend in the sun and to have a goal for that friendship, Namely, that goal is to “fill” all of the vegetation with energy and “ripeness.”

CLOSE READING STARTERS FOR PERSONIFICATION:

-The personification of ___________ in the lines “_________________________________” is significant because __________________________.

-The personification of _______________ allows the reader to _______________________________.