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While personification is a common literary device and a promi- nent feature of lyric poetry in particular, the fact remains that the status of personification in the field of tropology has been in one way or another indefinite and volatile, resulting in a wide range of disagreement over its significance. Providing a critical overview of its problems and exploring its nature vis-à-vis some other allied tropes will perhaps save personification from such confusion and lead to a proper understanding of its importance.
One of the prevailing critical attitudes toward personification is indifference. Paul de Man illustrates such indifference in liter- ary criticism with an example drawn from Michael Riffaterre's discussion of Hugo's poem "Ecrit sur la vitre d'une fenêtre flamande." According to de Man, Riffaterre, though noticing the dependence of the poem on what he calls personification, only emphasizes the banality of this device and "does not seem to consider it as being in any way remarkable, stylistically or otherwise" (47). Personification for Riffaterre, at least in the poem, is a given rather than a problem and, as such, needs no detailed explanation. Such a reaction indicates that if it is natural to make a distinction between the animate and the inanimate or between the human and the non-human, the violation of such a distinction by language is familiar, far from arousing bafflement. This supposed familiarity is certainly problematic from a decon- structive point of view like de Man's, but at the same time it is not surprising, since it is a fact that personification, among other tropes, tends to be considered conventional. Conventionality or familiarity as a source of indifference has become a basic element in what characterizes personification.
There is an interesting episode in Chaucer's "The Par- doner's Tale" that will also help illustrate what is at issue. Three debauchees, drinking in a tavern, hear a bell clinking to announce that a corpse is being carried to its grave. One of them wants to know who it is, and his servant replies that the man, "an old felawe of youres," was suddenly killed by "a privee theef men clepeth Deeth, / That in this contree al the peple sleeth" (6.672, 675-76). He adds, "He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence" (6.679), thus warning...