Apostrophe & Personification: Poetic Comparison Essay -- essays resea

Percy Bysshe Shelleys poem, "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 personification, the application of human characteristics to something breathless. However, they form a paradox in the usage of these tools through the imagery they create. Both poets have breathed lifespan into inanimate objects, however devastation and aging are the prominent 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 contacts. Though leaves are 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 necessary to have a soul and this is specific to manhood and other mamm als. Shelley uses the idea of giving a soul to an inanimate object in the second stanza of his poem as well. In the fourth line, he uses angels as a metaphor for decaying leaves. Here, the commentator 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 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 personification by assigning emotion to some of natures elements. In the eleventh line, Shelley declares that the "sea-blooms and the oozy woods" impart "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 ag ain, managed to give the reader an intense image of foliage shaking 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 arms 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 conk out 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 entire poem by allowing the inanimate object to b e the speaker itself. She excessively 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 giving life to an inanimate object, but by giving it death.