Reason, indeed, may oft complain For Nature’s sad reality,
Reason, Nature, and Truth, personified, bring the what the speaker would like to avoid. They bring pain, suffering, and complaining. While imagination brings flowers, associated with happiness, but they are trampled by Truth, bringing our speaker to face their melancholy.
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
As we begin the poem, we immediately see imagination personified as a dear friend so that our speaker may no longer suffer. The words from the "kind voice" gives the reader and speaker comfort from the initial lines of despair.
pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
The personification of the exhaustion makes me question if the exhaustion is only from grief she had just experienced or if it had been there for a while.
I'll open Archive and search for tags related to the topic (plus a few random searches just to see what novel ideas want to show up)
I love the way Jeannel King personifies her ideas.
However, what if we replace “ human face ” in this decisive quotewith “interface,” that is, the interface between man and apparatus?
This wording seems quite profound.
It means that by creating a personification of our tools, we can more easily communicate with them.
Do people personify their computers? I remember in the late 80s and early 90s computer workstations, especially in university settings, having personified names.
Link this to the personification of rocks w.r.t. talking rocks and oral traditions.
Put Eidsheim 2015 and O'Callaghan 2007 in dialogue with each other.
Brandon Lewis seems to be talking about actively taking two papers and placing them "in dialogue with each other" potentially by reading, annotating, and writing about them with himself as an intermediary.
Another moon; but oh, methinks, how slow
Personification of the moon: Theseus refers to the moon as "she," perhaps in reference to mythology or to emphasize how he looks forward to his wedding day.
Turn melancholy forth to funerals; The pale companion is not for our pomp.
Melancholy is the "pale companion"
Another moon; but oh, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
Personification of the moon: Theseus refers to the moon as "she," perhaps in reference to mythology or to emphasize how he looks forward to his wedding day.
The pale companion is not for our pomp.
Melancholy is the "pale companion"
Unresting death
he introduces death by personifying death so it becomes something concrete to think about
standing chill
Another METONYMY depicting death, this one focusing on the unnerving aspect of the unknown. Death is a slight chill down the spine, present enough to have an effect on everyday life but not present enough to directly confront. It captures the uneasiness and ambiguity of death.
This is the story of how a bill to save the vote and preserve a semblance of democracy for millions of Americans died at the hands of an intransigent, reactionary minority in the Senate, which used the filibuster to do its dirty work
The author starts off by personifying "the bill" as something that was supposed to save millions of Americans, but rather was killed by Senators. He immediately provides a brief overview of the claim of his essay before developing his narrative. This way, the audience gets a glimpse of the issue that the author will tackle. Also, by using words such as "intransigent and reactionary", the audience already understands that the author is going to be criticizing the senators for their action.
‘His will is found,’ said Mortimer, catching Mrs Podsnap’s rocking-horse’s eye.
Dickens often includes small, almost arbitrary details that absorb the reader and help shape the imagined world's settings by giving characters human-like interactions with them. In this example, Dickens makes the character Mortimer believable as a human by showing the reader his capacity to personify the rocking-horse.
gazed
The language of sight here in the opening personifies the houses on the street, and sets the empty house as being even further isolated than just physically being at the blind end. The language of sight and blindness continues in the story, with the boy's glimpses of the woman motivating his journey. I'd be interested to trace that across all the stories here
It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.
Super interesting how Joyce complicates the narrator's perspective on..death? The man's words? "It" sounds like it's some kind of elusive power/force in the first part of the sentence, but then "I longed to be nearer to it" makes it sound almost like a friend or even a lover, and finally the last part of the sentence makes "it" seem like an artist.
graveyard flowers were blooming, and their smell drifted across the cotton field and through every room of our house, speaking softy the names of our dead.I
Flowers can't speak
here the palmetto fronds whispered by the stream.
Palmetto fronds can't whisper they are plants
Rhetoric categorizes
And now the landing-stage came out to meet them. Slowly it swam towards the Picton boat,
This excerpt personifies the "landing-stage" with the verbs "came" and "swam." Where else does this occur in this story? And what does this device imply about the "voyage" that the story recounts? Part-of-speech tagging would allow us to examine when, how, and to what effect(s) objects becoming (grammatical) subjects through personification.
"A week since father died, A week since father died," cried the barrel-organ.
The song and cry of the barrel-organ are given human-traits, reflecting what the girls were having in mind.
Curious Laura chose to linger Wondering at each merchant man. One had a cat’s face, One whisk’d a tail, One tramp’d at a rat’s pace, One crawl’d like a snail, One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. She heard a voice like voice of doves Cooing all together: They sounded kind and full of loves In the pleasant weather.
I noticed a lot of references here to different animals. Laura compared all of the goblin men using features of animals
The river created Los Angeles, and almost destroyed it
Emphasizes the power of the river; suggests it has agency. Personification?
The Things They CarriedBy Tim O’BrienThe Things They CarriedFirst Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieute
The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island -- to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba. Those waters also carried generations of Cuban revolutionaries to the United States, where they built support for their cause.
President Obama refers to the blue sea as carrying battleships and revolutionaries, thus giving the blue sea human characteristics. We all know that water can not carry, therefore making it human like.