40 Personification Examples for Students
September 30, 2024
If you’ve ever written a text to the tune of It’s such a happy day! or That outfit seems a little desperate, doesn’t it? then you’ve used personification. Quite simply, personification is a literary device that attributes human traits to non-human animals and objects. You personify them. You write a description to make them person-like. It’s personification, get it? If it still seems a little hard to grasp, how about some personification examples from music?
- Frank Sinatra, in “New York, New York:” I wanna wake up in a city that never sleeps.
- Michael Jackson, in “Thriller:” You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it / You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes / You’re paralyzed / ‘Cause this is thriller, thriller night /And no one’s gonna save you from the beast about to strike.
- Green Day, in “Good Riddance:” Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road / Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go.
In each one of these examples, there’s a nonhuman thing that is taking a human action. The city never sleeps. Horror looks at you. Time grabs you. The actions are figurative—of course we know that time cannot literally extend hands and take you by the wrist, even though it might feel every so often like we are being metaphorically “grabbed” by time. Without other words to describe what that feeling feels like—the feeling of being pulled ahead by time, for example—we extend our human language to make sense of an otherwise inexplicable sensation.
Isn’t language beautiful?
And this answers the question: why use personification?
Personification, as a literary device, can enrich your writing with imagery, emotion, and texture. It can open up more intimacy between you and your reader can help you create something new in your writing or get closer to expressing an idea in a new way. It can also just let you have fun with your writing—and isn’t that the most important thing?
Creating some kind of honest or interesting personification in your writing has to do with associative thinking. Our brains work by building associations—connections—between the different concepts that we encounter in the world and how they interact with other concepts or objects. So, for instance, if you read the word “dog,” your brain might immediately prep itself with all the other words that you know that are related to dogs: leash, walk, food, best friend, fur, the list goes on. These associations help us to keep things ordered in our minds: we draw connections between the things that seemingly belong together.
Personification Examples (Continued)
Personifying a nonhuman thing, however, involves moving outside of the realm of your normal associations. It involves seeing something in one way, and being willing to apply human traits to the thing that doesn’t normally apply. It involves creating new associations in your brain between human characteristics and behaviors and all the other nonhuman things in the world.
And you have to really see or feel that association in your life, you know?
How else could Jimi Hendrix have sung: And the wind cries Mary?
How else could Emily Dickinson have written: The heart wants what it wants—or else it does not care… ?
You have to be willing to look at the world with a wider aperture—a more open lens—than you may have been taught to do. But there’s really no wrong way to write creatively—you can just start.
40 Personification Examples for Students
Here are some examples of personification (from me) to help get your old gears turning.
1) And as we climbed, the mountain ignored us. The land was disinterested in our survival.
2) When I dropped her food in front of her, the pregnant cat hissed at me. Even though we had become friends, she still didn’t trust me, at least not when it came to feeding herself—and the kittens she was just days from having.
3) The cold shower smacked me across the face first thing in the morning.
4) The river ran away from us, so quickly that we couldn’t catch up, because, of course, it hadn’t wanted to be caught.
5) Her eyes screamed: don’t leave, it’s my fault.
6) Even though the rain beat down angrily on the roof, I was glad to hear it.
7) No one wanted to see the fire die, and yet, none of us was brave enough to work to keep it alive. It would have meant sitting in the silence longer, the only chatter coming from the crackling flames.
Personification Examples (Continued)
8) George loved his hamburgers, and his hamburgers loved him—of that he could be sure. They had never betrayed him, never tortured him with a lack of a reply to a long series of text messages. The hamburger were always there on the other side of the door of the cafe, not like some people, who chose to be conveniently “out” every time he came knocking.
9) Kansas wasn’t like other states. You couldn’t see her from the shore, no, but when you got closer, you saw her blonde wheat waving in the wind, the occasional moonflower strewn across the strands to reveal to you her untamed beauty.
10) My love was pure, innocent, and also somehow wise. For the first time I felt that my love knew me better than I knew myself.
11) The train chugged on wearily despite the exhausting climb.
12) The crows laughed at me, laughed at my misfortune, and I knew they were planning, later, to come back for the coins that had scattered to the corners of the street I could no longer see.
13) I heard the engine hiccup—one, twice—I twisted the key and toed the gas. The starter gasped itself open as if coming up for air.
14) Orange was so docile, the color opened its palm to me for no reason at all.
Personification Examples (Continued)
15) His ignorance suckerpunched me over and over again. Was he being deliberately dense? And why did it hurt so badly?
16) No one was stupid enough to believe that once grief had kissed you, it would ever let you go.
17) But really, the truth was, the whole university was a liar. The dormitories had lied. The libraries had lied. Even the pathetic fried chicken sandwiches had lied to me. I stood on the fountain at midnight and listened for all the pathetic things it would try to say to apologize.
18) My heart was jumping rope.
19) Lenny’s tireless, patient hands carved the wood.
20) “Let’s be honest,” said Timothy. “Marjorie’s hair had taken a Xanax and was phoning into work from a vodka lunch.”
21) The weeping willow cried, and I didn’t have to anymore.
Personification Examples (Continued)
22) It was September’s raging spite at me. All I could think of was how it had stolen summer out from underneath us.
23) The pile of laundry mocked me. “You’ll never pick us up,” my socks scoffed at me.
24) The universe loves me, I know it.
That was fun, but enough of me for now. Hopefully you can start to see some of the different ways you can start to play around with personification in the above examples. You can start simply by just assigning a human verb (walking, crying, laughing, loving) to a plant, an animal, or a moment in time.
Using personification in your writing is really just about imbuing the world around you with human character and emotion, and allowing yourself to describe that emotion in the object to the best of your ability. The more you feel, the better.
Let’s look at some examples from other writers, both modern and classic, from whom you will undoubtedly learn a great deal more.
25) “Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside, indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-colored moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew had any chance against death.” –Virginia Woolf, “Death of a Moth”
List Continued
26) “At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel.” –George Orwell, “A Hanging”
27) “Come, said my soul, / Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,) / That should I after return, / Or, long, long hence, in other spheres, / There to some group of mates the chants resuming, / (Tallying Earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,) / Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on, / Ever and ever yet the verses owning—as, first, I here and now / Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name,” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
28) “O sweet spontaneous / earth how often have / the / doting / fingers of / prurient philosophers pinched / and / poked / thee,” –E.E. Cummings, “[O sweet spontaneous]”
29) “Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me – / The Carriage held but just Ourselves – / And Immortality.” –Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Personification Examples (Continued)
30) “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right.” –Maggie Nelson, Bluets
31) “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.” –Toni Morrison, Beloved
32) “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief.” –William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
33) “The moors sighed with the weight of the secrets they held, whispering tales of love and revenge.” –Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
34) “The ship danced over the waves, eager to return to Ithaca.” –Homer, The Odyssey
35) “Blackberries . . . I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me. They accommodate themselves to my milk bottle, flattening their sides.” –Silvia Plath, “Blackberrying”
List Continued
36) “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.” –James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook”
37) “Once I resorted to psychoanalysis. It was summer, just after the war, and I was living in Rome. It was a sultry dusty summer.” –Natalia Ginzburg, “My psychoanalysis.”
38) “Tiny, tossed sailboat, alone in dark waters.” –Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
39) “Her stiff hand jogged in the aisle, a transparency through which one saw the knotted veins.” –Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
And finally, one of my favorite lines is all of cinema:
40) “Don’t you think daisies are just the friendliest flower?” Meg Ryan, sick with a cold, speaking to her nemesis and future lover, Tom Hanks, in You’ve Got Mail.
Final Thoughts
It’s also worth noting that personification and anthropomorphism are not the same thing. Personification is when a speaker or writer grants human traits to a nonhuman thing, like in the examples above. Anthropomorphism is a nonhuman animal that is made to be human, but not necessary in a literary way. Think, for example, of Barney the Dinosaur, the dogs in Paw Patrol, or the large, singing, mechanized barnyard animals who live inside of every Chuck E. Cheese.
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