Personification is a type of metaphor that attributes human traits to objects, animals, or abstract ideas. Many examples are common in everyday parlance: headlights wink, the sun smiles down, and opportunity knocks. Poets use personification frequently. Hall describes a river that "…with its white hair staggers to the sea" and refers to a stone as "the closed eye of the dirt." Frost extends the use of personification when he describes bent birches, "their trunks arching in the woods/Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,/Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/Before them over their heads to dry in the sun." Personification is an important poetic tool because it connects the reader to ideas and brings them to life.
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In english there are many key concepts and terms that are crucial for students to know and understand. Often it can be hard to determine what the most important english concepts and terms are, and even once you’ve identified them you still need to understand what they mean. To help you learn and understand key english terms and concepts, we’ve identified some of the most important ones and provided detailed definitions for them, written and compiled by Chegg experts.