This unit is ≈13% of the English Lit, across 6 lessons. Full syllabus
English Lit · Lesson 4 of 6 · Unit 5
Personification and allusion
3 quick checks ≈1% of the test7 min read · about 1 h with practicePreview
You’re reading a preview of this lesson. Already on Pro? Sign in to read it all.
Poets use personification and allusion to compress deep emotional and cultural weight into a single phrase. On the AP English Literature exam, both Section I multiple-choice items and Section II essays test whether you can move past merely spotting these devices to explain their function—how humanizing a concept or invoking an outside reference reveals the speaker’s complex attitude or shapes the poem’s meaning.
By the end you’ll be able to
Identify personification and explain how assigning a human trait or quality characterizes a nonhuman object, entity or idea.
Identify an allusion to a literary work, myth, sacred text, work of art, or person, place or event outside the text.
Explain the function of a personification or an allusion in a poem or passage.
What the exam asks
Section I (Multiple choice): Questions in the Comparison (6.C, 6.D) category ask what specific trait a personified object is given, how that trait characterizes the speaker’s relationship to it, or how a footnoted reference (allusion) shapes the tone or meaning of specific lines.
Preview
Upgrade to Pro to unlock the rest
You’ve read the first part of this lesson. The rest is part of Pro: about 5 more minutes of reading, plus the quick check.
Section II (Poetry Analysis, Question 1): Your commentary earns Row B (Evidence and Commentary) credit when it explains why a poet gives a nonhuman force human agency, or how an allusion imports ideas from an older story to complicate the speaker’s present situation.
Core ideas
Personification (Skill 6.C, FIG-1.V)
Personification gives human traits, emotions, intentions, or actions to something that is not human: an object, a natural force, an animal, or an abstract idea (like Death, Time, or Memory). It works as a comparison: the nonhuman thing is presented as if it were a person.
By giving a nonhuman entity human qualities, the speaker characterizes it much like a person in a story:
Agency and power: Does the personified entity comfort, bully, deceive, or ignore the speaker?
Relationship and intimacy: Calling an abstract force “friend” or “thief” shows how the speaker experiences that force emotionally.
Perspective: How a speaker humanizes nature or an idea reveals the speaker’s own psychological state (for example, describing the wind as “plotting” reveals the speaker’s paranoia or vulnerability).
Allusion (Skill 6.D, FIG-1.W)
An allusion is a brief, often indirect reference to a significant person, place, event, literary work, myth, sacred text, or work of art outside the poem.
Allusions work by importing a web of associations from the source into the poem:
Parallel comparison: The speaker aligns a moment in the poem with a famous story (such as the Garden of Eden or Icarus) to elevate its importance.
Ironic contrast: The speaker compares an ordinary or flawed situation to a heroic myth to highlight how much the modern world falls short.