Apostrophe & Personification: Poetic Comparison Essay -- essays resea

Percy Bysshe Shelleys verse contrive, "Ode to the West Wind" and Sylvia Plaths song "Mirror" twain employ the poetic tools of apostrophe, the address to something that is intangible, and prosopopoeia, the application of human characteristics to something inanimate. However, they form a paradox in the usage of these tools through the imagery they create. Both poets expression breathed life into inanimate objects, however death and aging argon the prominent themes within both of these works.     In "Ode to the West Wind", Shelley personifies numerous of natures elements by attaching descriptions of remains of death that be typically human. He begins the poem with a simile by comparing the autumn leaves to ghosts. Though leaves argon in fact, living things, the term "ghost" implies a spirit or presence from a living being who has passed on. To become a ghost, it is undeniable to have a soul and this is specialized to humans and other mammals. Shelley uses the vagary of giving a soul to an inanimate object in the twinkling stanza of his poem as well. In the fourth fall, he uses angels as a metaphor for decaying leaves. Here, the reader is compelled to envision spirit beings falling from the sky with the fall and lightning. In another area of the poem where Shelley applies human death attributes, he states that each of the "winged seeds" is "like a corpse within its rub" (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 personification by assigning emotion to some of natures elements. In the eleventh line, Shelley declares that the "sea-blooms and the leaky woods" will "suddenly grow grey with fear". The emotions he assigns are relative to the mind of death. These are the feelings that humans develop when they feel that death is nea r. Shelley has again, managed to give the reader an intense image of foliage thrill in their roots at the thought of the west 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 mail from the mirror extending outward toward the 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 nonagenarian 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 cross the entire poem by allowing the inanimate object to be the speaker itself. She also 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 hypothesise the image of aging, and the sadness of the inevitability of death. Ironically, Shelley has managed to employ the tool of personification, not by giving life to an inanimate object, but by giving it death.