Page 44 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 4: Major Literary Terms-IV

image of pastoral harmony. However, Milton in turn continually comes back to Satan, constructing Notes
him as a character the audience can easily identify with and perhaps even like. Milton creates Satan
as character meant to destabilize the audience’s understanding of themselves and the world around
them. Through this mode, Milton is able to create a working dialogue between the text and his audience
about the ‘truths’ they hold for themselves.

4.5 Personification

Personification is giving human qualities to animals or objects. Personification is a figure of speech
in which the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a nonhuman form as if it were a person.
William Blake’s “O Rose, thou art sick!”, is one example; Donne’s “Death, be not proud” is another.
Gregory Corso quarrels with a series of personified abstractions in his poem “The Whole Mess . . .
Almost.” Personification is often used in symbolic or allegorical poetry; for instance, the virtue of
Justice takes the form of the knight Artegal in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Personification - a figure of speech in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are
endowed with human form, character, traits, or sensibilities. An entirely imaginary creature or
person also may be conceived of as representing an idea or object. Like a metaphor, personification
is a frequent resource in poetry.
A colloquial example of personification is when one refers to a ship as “she.” Another example of
personification is “the wind shrieked through the window.”
Example:

A smiling moon, a jovial sun
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
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful—

In John Keats’ “To Autumn,” the fall season is personified as “sitting careless on a granary floor”
(line 14) and “drowsed with the fume of poppies” (line 17.)

4.6 Rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and
songs. The word “rhyme” may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief
rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.
In a perfect rhyme the last stressed vowel and all following sounds are identical in both words. If
the sound preceding the stressed vowel is also identical, the rhyme is sometimes considered to be
inferior and not a perfect rhyme after all. An example of such a “super-rhyme” or “more than
perfect rhyme” is the “identical rhyme”, in which not only the vowels but also the onsets of the
rhyming syllables are identical, as in gun and begun. Punning rhymes such are “bare” and “bear”
are also identical rhymes. The rhyme may of course extend even farther back than the last stressed
vowel. If it extends all the way to the beginning of the line, so that there are two lines that sound
identical, then it is called a “holorhyme”.

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