Personification is a figure of speech in which human characteristics are transferred to something that isn’t a human being, as in:

The chimney belched out thick black smoke.

Obviously a chimney can’t belch, because that’s something only humans can do.

Likewise, if you said the wind whispered, or the dog smiled, these would both be examples of personification. Whispering or smiling is an action that only a human can perform in the real world, and that’s why you find personification in literature.

Here’s a well-known example of personification by the poet Carl Sandburg, the opening lines from his poem Chicago:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

Chicago, a city, has big shoulders, makes tools, stacks wheat, and butchers pigs. These tough, industrial images are clearly giving the windy city all the attributes of a hard-working human being.

Here’s a great example from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

You can almost see “sleep” getting out its size 8 knitting needles.

Personification forms a large part of our culture and folklore. We ascribe human features to concepts such as death and the passing of time, hoping to understand them better but also to make them a little easier to deal with.

There’s the image of Father Time, the bearded elderly gentleman carrying a scythe and an hourglass, the personification of time itself. Then there are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing Pestilence, War, Famine and Death.

Personification became a driving force in 18th-century neoclassical poetry. Here’s a typical example taken from The Epitaph in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth
A youth to fortune and to fame unknown.   
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,   
And Melancholy marked him for her own.

Finally, we come to the Grim Reaper, as personified brilliantly in this excerpt from Sandburg’s poem Death Snips Proud Men:

Death is stronger than all proud men and so death snips proud men on the nose,
throws a pair of dice and says: Read ‘em and weep.
Death sends a radiogram every day: When I want you I’ll drop in -
and then one day he comes with a master-key and lets himself in and says: We’ll go now.

T.S. Eliot puts it another way in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

Image via Wikipedia

Think of personification the next time you see leaves dancing in your driveway, feel Jack Frost nipping at your nose, or discover that love is blind.