Personification and Hyperbole
Completion requirements
Unit 3
What Does It Mean to Explore?
Reader's Notebook
Personification and Hyperbole
Two other forms of poetic figures of speech are given below.
Personification is giving human traits to objects, colours, qualities, or ideas.
The stars winked at me.
Stars are burning suns that do not have eyes with which to wink as humans do. In this example, stars are given the human trait of opening and closing one eye.
Till the stars had run away and the shadows eaten the moon. WB Yeats
The stars do not have feet with which to run away, nor, can shadows eat the moon. Both stars and shadows are given human traits of eating and running.
Hyperbole compares two items using exaggeration.
The poet is taking a walk and notices a field of yellow flowers. The daffodils are compared to stars. The point of comparison is the huge amount. This is hyperbole or exaggeration because there are not billions of flowers. The large number of flowers is emphasized by the words “crowd, host, milky way, never-ending, and ten thousand”.
When the poet sees the wind move through the flowers, he enjoys watching them dance and he thinks about the beautiful sight for a long time afterward.
I wandered, lonely as a cloud...
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils...
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance....
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
– William Wordsworth
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils...
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance....
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
– William Wordsworth
The poet is taking a walk and notices a field of yellow flowers. The daffodils are compared to stars. The point of comparison is the huge amount. This is hyperbole or exaggeration because there are not billions of flowers. The large number of flowers is emphasized by the words “crowd, host, milky way, never-ending, and ten thousand”.
When the poet sees the wind move through the flowers, he enjoys watching them dance and he thinks about the beautiful sight for a long time afterward.
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