Personification: Giving Ideas Human Form
Sean Glatch | June 21, 2026 |
The nine creative Muses, Mother Nature, Father Time, Cupid’s arrow—these are all examples of personification, a literary device you probably already use.
Humans have a tendency to see themselves in everything. Personification is one such manifestation of this. When we lend personhood to ideas, concepts, other organisms, or the built environment, we engage in personification.
Understanding personification helps us both analyze literature and see new possibilities for our own writing. Let’s look how personification works, including examples of personification in literature and exercises for your own poetry or prose.
First, what is personification?
Personification: Contents
Personification Definition
Personification happens when a concept or nonhuman entity is represented as a human, or at least imbued with strongly human-like qualities.
Put more simply, personification is when you represent a concept, object, or event as though it were a human.
Personification is when you represent a concept, object, or event as though it were a human.
Ancient polytheistic religions, like the Greek and Roman pantheons, are populated with human representations of concepts: Ares, for example, is the god of war, and is depicted as a muscular armyman with weapons and armor.
But a prayer to Ares is a prayer to the concept of battle, just as a prayer to the Muses is a prayer to the concept of inspired poetry or inspired music.
Moreover, personification occurs any time we attribute human qualities to nonhuman things.
Moreover, personification occurs any time we attribute human qualities to nonhuman things. The man on the moon is not a personification, but if he smiles or frowns at you, then you’re imbuing him with human emotion and action. A storm is an unfeeling, unthinking entity, but if that lightning strike seems “angry,” you just personified it with feeling.
Personification: Why Do We Do It So Much?
The human mind is a meaning-making machine. It connects dots and makes assumptions and thinks X is like Y. And it has a tendency to see itself in everything.
An idea is often easier to communicate when the writer starts from a place of common knowledge. Common knowledge, for all of us, is the human experience.
An idea is often easier to communicate when the writer starts from a place of common knowledge. Common knowledge, for all of us, is the human experience.
So I can say that a winter wind is cold, and you know about coldness. But if I say the winter wind “sucker-punches,” now I’ve just given you the visual of ice wind fighting your face. You feel it in a way that is deeper than simply knowing. (See more: “show, don’t tell.”)
Our minds are also just wired this way. A related psychological phenomenon is pareidolia, which is the tendency to see meaningful images in random patterns. For example, we see a human face on the moon when it’s all just craters. This tendency of creative comparison is at the core of many literary devices, including metaphor and symbolism.
Is Personification a Form of Metaphor?
Sometimes!
Personification is often a metaphor or symbol for something else.
A metaphor is any device that fulfills the statement “X is Y.” Shakespeare gives us this lovely personification example, which is also a metaphor:
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
—Hamlet
This is an artful way of saying that the red morning sun rises over the dewy hills. It states “the morning is a person in red walking up a mound.” (This is one of many personification examples in Shakespeare.)
Personification is often a metaphor or symbol for something else.
Alternately, a symbol is any image or object that represents a broader feeling or concept. It fulfills the statement “X represents Y.” Here’s Hamlet again:
FIRST CLOWN.
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! A pour’d a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.
HAMLET.
This?
FIRST CLOWN.
E’en that.
HAMLET.
Let me see. [Takes the skull.] Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.—Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
To Hamlet, Yorick’s skull represents the inherent meaninglessness of life, as Yorick can no longer bring joy or mirth to humankind. It is worth noting that this scene takes place towards the end of the play, in which Hamlet has become severely demoralized about human will and nature and believes all effort of goodness is worthless.
So Yorick’s skull symbolizes nihilism. You could argue it’s also personification, in that his skull is literally human, and so embodies Hamlet’s belief in the futility of goodness. But this is definitely not a metaphor, because Yorick’s skull is only one representation of Hamlet’s nihilism. (Metaphors tend to be more “total” in scope.)
A less convoluted example is the Greek goddess Aphrodite. She is the personification of love, and thus symbolizes or represents the idea of love itself.
Anthropomorphism Vs Personification
A related term to personification is anthropomorphism, a Greek-rooted word meaning “the idea of human form.”
Anthropomorphism is the physical attribution of human traits to nonhuman things. It always occurs when a concrete image or entity is imbued with human qualities.
Anthropomorphism occurs when a concrete image or entity is imbued with human qualities.
Bugs Bunny, for example, is an anthropomorphized rabbit. He walks on two legs, eats with his hands and speaks English—which real life rabbits do not do.
In literature, the satire Animal Farm is a good example—the pigs on this farm plot, scheme, and write like humans do.
Personification is the human representation of concepts, events, and objects. It’s a little more abstract. You wouldn’t say that Aphrodite anthropomorphizes love, because love is an idea or feeling. It is enacted in physical bodies, but love itself is abstract and different for everyone. Aphrodite personifies love, because love does not have a physical form that can be made more human.
As for nonhuman entities, you would personify a storm, but anthropomorphize a dog. Typically, other animals are anthropomorphized, not personified, because animals are close enough in nature to humans that they are easily imbued with human qualities. But a storm—or, for that matter: a country, a philosophy, a month, a river—would be personified.
The Pathetic Fallacy
One last device worth mentioning is the pathetic fallacy. “Pathetic” and “fallacy” both sound like harsh terms, but this isn’t a bad thing to do: the pathetic fallacy is simply the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman things.
The aforementioned “angry storm” is an example of this. Storms, as far as we know, do not experience emotions. But we say a storm is angry when it is loud and aggressive, much like human anger can be.
The pathetic fallacy is the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman things.
I might say that a tall tree “looks down at me judgmentally.” Or that the man on the moon “is full of glee.” But these are projections of human emotion, and thus forms of personification.
It’s a little trickier with animals, as we know they experience emotions. It probably is not a pathetic fallacy to say my cat is happy sleeping next to me. Of course, it’s hard to tell sometimes what animals are thinking and feeling, so sometimes we do project human emotions onto them. And, certainly, if I said that a spider in my bedroom is jealous of my cool new iPhone, that’s a pathetic fallacy… I don’t believe spiders get jealous like us.
Personification Examples in Literature
These examples of personification come from published works of fiction.
Excerpt from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions–“Will you fade? Will you perish?”–scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.
This excerpt, from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, gives the concepts of loveliness and stillness three moments of personification: their clasping hands, their “rubbing, snuffling, iterating,” and their call-and-response.
At times, To the Lighthouse is a bit maddening, as its narrator is omniscient and flits between the minds of different characters through these lyrical, if overwrought, paraphrases. But personification here amplifies the room’s lovely stillness, rendering a complete image in the reader’s mind that feels both motionless and alive.
Excerpt from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Marullus
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?
Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.
Shakespeare often uses personification hyperbolically. In this passage from Julius Caesar, Marullus describes the Tiber river as a consciously trembling entity—with the effect of criticizing the crowds of Rome for their unruliness.
If anything, Marullus here imbues the crowds with too much power, as though their shouting could actually animate a river into trembling. But the hyperbole is the point, here: not only does it get across Marullus’ anger, but it is also rather entertaining.
Excerpt from Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Not just beautiful, though — the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me. What I’ve up till now, what I’m going to do — they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart’s pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I’ve never given them more than a passing thought before. Not just the stars — how many other things haven’t I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about?
Technically, this passage doesn’t lead with a personification, but rather with a simile: trees are, indeed, living and breathing things. But then the stars are watching Kafka, the narrator. And not just metaphorically, but with actual “watchful eyes.” Sure, other animals have watchful eyes, but the omniscient nature of these stars imbues them with a certain human knowingness.
You might think this passage lacks intentionality in its word choice. It uses too many figurative devices to find what it wants to say about the stars, and that phrase “a mile a minute” is inarguably cliche. But Kafka is a teenage boy, and an essential experience of Murakami’s novel is living or reliving the epiphanies we have as we come of age.
Poetic Personification Examples
Personification in poetry differs little from personification in prose. Nonetheless, poetry’s concision can make personified ideas much more heightened and visible. Poems sometimes also rely on personification as their central literary device.
Here are a few poetic personification examples.
“Sneaking Onto the Reservoir Again” by Robert Wood Lynn
Everything this year gave me it took back
quicker—lovers, money, reckless smiles
of restless friends. According to the awful math
of planets, summer’s next. I brace for autumn
to come for it the way I used to collect you
drunk at a bar. If a season wants to stay—
to linger past enunciation like you were given to
so often—why stop it? What will October make
of its belligerence? Superheroes begging parents
to let them outside without jackets, you and I sweating
clean from the past? August is still here but you’re not
so this time I paddle out alone, rowing the rare thing
easier without you. By sundown the water is warmer
than the air breezing over it. It radiates like a man
next to me in bed and I stretch my arms across it
out of instinct. The ranger’s truck in a far field
cranking doo-wop because he thinks he’s alone.
I stroke slow to the backbeat, harmonies splitting
and rejoining as they’re carried to me over the water.
If they were birds we’d call that murmuration, fish
we’d call it schooling. If they were you, I’d know
that what we call the bad year has finally let go.
The year and the passing of seasons are never explicitly described as people, but they are imbued with enough human action and description that they’re undoubtedly subjects of personification. Robert Wood Lynn’s pathetic fallacies make for excellent, heartbreaking descriptions—I’m particularly drawn to the water radiating like a man next to the speaker in bed, and that human gesture of reaching one’s arms across it like a lover.
In personifying the passing of time, this poem relinquishes agency to something we have no control over, not unlike the feeling of waiting for the pain of heartbreak to subside.
“As Bee” by Paula Bohince
Forgive my trespass, I mistook for work a crown
of raspberries and custard. Thank you, tartlet, thank you,
Miss, for arranging it on a doily on a saucer, thank you, Nature
for these hypnotizing concentrics. My mother
(did I have one?) was likewise hypnotic. My queen,
she used and tossed me, thoughtless, from the palace.
But this isn’t a poem of woe. I’m illiterate
to that emotion. Spackled with sugar,
I’ve swum through dispassionate debris. I’m ready
to lie, freakish and freezing, in a berry.
This is my first and only spring on earth. I get it.
I’m free as an orphan who’s aged out of a baffling system.
Still, the snowfall mornings. Still, the rosy sometimes.
To be alone in this world is fatal. I accept that.
It was all a blur, anyway. No biography. A complicated coin
paid my passage. Thank you. I won’t be returning.
This is an example of persona poetry, a poem in which the speaker is explicitly someone other than the poet. Here, the persona is that of an exiled bee. Any time a persona poem is written from the vantage of something other than a human, personification is inevitable. Not only are we giving a nonhuman thing human language, it also observes the world with a human’s mind, even if that human lends their imagination to a nonhuman perspective.
Bohince plays with this dynamic, at times reminding us of what the speaker isn’t—for example, she is “illiterate” to woe. But can a queen bee use and toss another bee thoughtlessly? Can a bee feel “free as an orphan?” These are, perhaps, questions for apiarists and not poets. Nonetheless, this poem lends human thought to a bee’s experiences, resulting in some sort of personifying persona piece.
“Sonnet 18” by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shakespeare’s work is full of personification, so it’s inevitable we use him for poetry, too. In this sonnet, we get three things personified to us: the sun is “the eye of Heaven” (which means Heaven has eyes); the sun has a “gold complexion” (as though the sun had glowing skin); and Death is a thing that could brag about whoever “wanders in his shade”.
Here, personification is mostly a flourish of Shakespeare’s craft—it’s a strategy he often uses. But by personifying the natural world, the speaker here elevates the subject’s beauty above the elements, placing her on a pedestal akin to eternal life or godhood.
Personification Prompts and Exercises
As a concept, personification is easy to understand: make something humanlike and see what happens.
Still, writers and poets use this device to get across specific ideas or arguments. So here are a few prompts and exercises to help you try your hand at personification in poetry or prose.
1. Concept Character Sketches
A character sketch is an exercise in defining the traits—both physical and personality-wise—of a fictional character. You can learn about them at our article on character development.
In this exercise, you’ll create a character sketch for a concept or idea. Shakespeare does this with the concept of Death, and Woolf does it with the concepts of loveliness and stillness. Really, there is no end of ideas, concepts, and abstractions to choose—so go for an idea that interests you.
Ask yourself, if my concept was a person:
- What gender would it have?
- What would its physical appearance be—hair color, skin color, height, body type, etc.?
- How does this concept move its body?
- How does this concept dress? What is its sense of fashion?
- Where does this concept live?
- What personality does this concept have? How does it speak, and what words does it speak with?
- How does this concept navigate conflict?
- What does this concept most want? What does it most fear?
- How does this concept behave in social settings?
- What relationship do you have with the concept? What relationship does it have with you?
The point is to choose traits that conform to your conception of the concept. But be creative and willing to make surprising decisions. For example, we would all expect Death to have dark hair and a brooding personality; if Death were a bald, unserious jokester with a childlike demeanor, that’s unexpected, and also quite interesting.
Once you’ve completed this character sketch, you might give it a name and make it a protagonist in a story. You might write a poem expanding on your conception. You might make this character a symbol or some other figurative device. Above all, have fun with the creative process.
2. A Conversation Between Two Personifications
Following the above exercise, another thing you can do is try to put two or more concepts in conversation with one another.
You don’t necessarily have to create character sketches for both concepts—though you certainly can! But you should think through how these concepts might communicate and conduct themselves. What dialogue do they use? How do they choose their words? What are their desires and fears?
Use your creative mind to see where this conversation goes. Don’t be afraid to generate conflict and tension. And try to pick two concepts you wouldn’t expect to speak to one another: Love and Death have spoken to each other plenty of times in literary history, but I have yet to see a conversation between, for example, Mercantilism and Anxiety. (Why would they talk to one another? Who knows! The fun is in the asking.)
3. Pathetic Fallacies
It is easy to see human emotion in the world around us. A loving breeze, some angry sunshine; the egoistic rev of a motorcycle, the self-hating putter of a dying vacuum.
Writers, also, write from emotion. For this exercise, write a short story or poem in which the speaker or narrator’s emotions are always displaced into the world around them.
This means that your speaker can never say something makes them angry, but they can interpret a soft, gentle breeze as being hostile or cautionary. Your narrator will not say “I love life,” but your narrator might describe the sound of revving engines as a conspiracy of joy.
Pathetic fallacy is a way of describing the world through our own biases and feelings. When we attribute our feelings to the world around us, we might stumble into fun and unexpected characterizations of the world. More than anything else, have fun with the idea!
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