How Does Sylvia Plath's Use Of Personification

Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, "Ode to the West Wind" and Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror" both employ the poetic tools of apostrophe, the address to something that is intangible, and personification, the application of human characteristics to something inanimate. However, they form a paradox in the usage of these tools through the imagery they create. Both poets have breathed life into inanimate objects, however death and aging are the prominent themes within both of these works. In "Ode to the West Wind", Shelley personifies many of nature's elements by attaching descriptions of remains of death that are typically human. He begins the poem with a simile by comparing the autumn leaves to ghosts. Though leaves are in fact, living things, the
872). While he doesn't assign human characteristics to the speaker's thoughts through words, Shelley does create another alternative to personification. He transforms the speaker's intangible thoughts into something that can be held and more importantly, thrown. In these last few stanzas of the poem, Shelley still manages to leave the reader with a final reference to morbidity. The speaker's request creates an undeniable image of a human's ashes being scattered in the earth as some final rite of
In the fifth line, the mirror calls itself "the eye" (Charters, p.1105). Here, it is easy for the reader to accept this idea because the looking glass is comparable to that of an eye in that it reflects images. In the eighth line of Plath's poem, the mirror claims to have a heart, however, this concept is not as easy for the reader to accept. Therefore, Plath seems to ask us to identify with the sentimentality the mirror has created over the wall that occupies its reflection for most of its