Personification In Charles Wright's Little Apocalypse

Personification: Personification is an example of figurative language in which nonhuman objects are given human characteristics or abstract ideas are presented as people by the author. Personification can make descriptions of non-human entities more vivid, or can help readers understand, sympathize with, or react emotionally to non-human characters. The connotative associations that are made with personified subjects allow for This literary device is an example of one the five principal tropes of literature and can be found in novels, poems, and other literary works.

Example: “The ground shudders beneath the ant’s hoof...the clouds assemble and mumble their messages. / Sedate , avaricious life. / The earthworm huddles in darkness, / the robin, great warrior, above, / Reworking across the shattered graves of his fathers. / The grass, in its green time, bows to whatever moves it” (3-11).

Function: Charles Wright’s fictional poem Little Apocalypse is a poem that utilizes the smaller segments of nature in a figurative fashion to illuminate the
The poem includes “the clouds assemble and mumble their messages” (6) and “the grass, in its green time, bows to whatever moves it” (11). The clouds must have been given the chance to “assemble” (6) and converge through the use of the same wind that swayed the grass. Personification does well to develop a sense of connectivity that all life has on Earth. Such examples are examples of personification namely because clouds cannot innately “mumble their messages” (6) and the ground does not innately shudder as an ant walks upon it (3). These non-living entities are given human characteristics in the form of sentiments and actions not natural to these entities in real