Apostrophe & Personification: Poetic Comparison Essay -- essays resea

Percy Bysshe Shelleys verse, "Ode to the West Wind" and Sylvia Plaths poem "Mirror" both engage the poetic tools of apostrophe, the address to something that is intangible, and incarnation, the application of human characteristics to something inanimate. However, they form a riddle in the usage of these tools through the see to itry they create. Both poets pay back breathed life into inanimate objects, however terminal and aging argon the self-aggrandizing themes within both of these works.     In "Ode to the West Wind", Shelley personifies many of natures 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 term "ghost" implies a spirit or comportment from a living being who has passed on. To become a ghost, it is necessary to have a soul and this is specific to humans and oth er mammals. Shelley uses the idea of boastful a soul to an inanimate object in the second stanza of his poem as well. In the fourth line, he uses angels as a fiction for decaying leaves. Here, the reader is compelled to envision spirit beings falling from the sky with the rain and lightning. In another area of the poem where Shelley applies human death attributes, he states that each(prenominal) of the "winged seeds" is "like a corpse within its grave" (Charters, p. 871). Again, he gives us the image of a human who has died and is lying in he or shes burial place.      In the third stanza of Shelleys poem, he uses incarnation by assigning emotion to some of natures elements. In the eleventh line, Shelley declares that the "sea-blooms and the oozy woodwind" will "suddenly grow grey with fear". The emotions he assigns are relative to the idea of death. These are the feelings that humans develop when they feel that death is near. Shelley has again, managed to give the reader an intense image of foliage shaking in their roots at the thought of the western hemisphere winds approach.     As the poem progresses, Shelley puts a new twist on the idea of personification. Or, more accurately, Shelley reverses the idea of personification by attaching inanimate qualities to the person speaking in apostrophe form to the west wind. In t... ... give the reader a picture of arms from the reflect extending outward toward the cleaning woman. In desperation of a different, younger image, the woman begins to cry. (Charters, p. 1105) The mirror acknowledges the process of age in the second to last line as well, by stating that "in me she has drowned a younger girl, and in me an old woman rises toward her day" (Charters, p. 1105).      Though both poems utilize the same tools, they do so in very different styles. Sylvia Plath used personification to encompass the absolute poem by allowing the inanimate object to be the speaker itself. She in any case gives the object various physical and emotional traits that are specific to humans. Shelleys poem, conversely, applies elements of personification to a few of the objects in his poem. Most of the human attributes Shelley gives to these objects are mainly metaphysical. The paradox of Sylvia Plaths "Mirror", is that the mirror is given life to reflect the image of aging, and the sadness of the inevitability of death. Ironically, Shelley has managed to employ the tool of personification, not by large-minded life to an inanimate object, but by giving it death.