Personification Of Animals

As humans, we are only able to understand the world around us in terms of the human experience, through human emotions, feelings, and perception. Authors will often personify other things in order to relate back to the human experience. Most likely of these cases, authors will personify animals. Sometimes this is deliberate and other times the author is personifying animals unintentionally, because that is the only way the author can perceive the animal in his or her own terms of the human experience. Since we are completely unaware of the experience of other creatures and cannot place ourselves in the mind of these animals, we must analyze the animal world in terms of the human experience. Two poems that use personification of an animal in order for the reader to relate to or understand the animal are “The oldest living Thing in L.A.” by Larry Levis and “A Romance for the Wild Turkey” by Paul Zimmer. Each of these poems are both about a specific animal. These two poems, while about different animals, both depict the ways in which …show more content…
The turkey in “A Romance for the Wild Turkey” has been deemed to be a dumb and fearful animal. It is “…incapable of passion or anger, knows only / vague innocence and extreme caution” which is almost the complete opposite of how the opossum is perceived, as it seems to act on passion and anger deliberately if threatened. Zimmer plays into the assumption that the turkey is brainless and spineless and therefore, at the end of the Zimmer’s poem, he turns the focus to himself because his hopes that the turkey dreams of flying away “Over chittering fields of corn / And the trivial fires of men, / never to land again not be regarded / As fearful, stupid, and unsure.” These are the last lines of the poem and it shows how the turkey is confined to the judgement of men as Zimmer hopes that he flies over the “trivial fires of men” which could mean the stereotypes we assign to the