Personification, by Lee Bennett Hopkins

Your students' daydreams about the "lives" of everyday things can make for great poetry

My book, Good Rhymes, Good Times (HarperCollins, 1995) opens with the following poem:

Sing a Song of Cities

Sing a song of cities.
If you do,
Cities will sing back to you.

They'll sing
in subway roars and rumbles.
People-laughs,
machine-loud grumbles.

Sing a song of cities.
If you do,
Cities will sing back to you.

©1974, 1995 by
Lee Bennett Hopkins.
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Of course cities cannot sing! As a writer, I am the voice that pretends they can. A poem written in this form is called personification, a piece of writing that gives human characteristics to abstractions or things that aren't human.

What if?
At one time or another, we've all daydreamed or wondered about the "lives" of everyday things. Ask your students to brainstorm a host of "what ifs?" Here are a few ideas to get them thinking about subjects for their personification poems:

• Does a baseball get sore being batted all the time?

• Do tree branches feel heavy when birds build nests in them?

• Imagine a flower witnessing spring for the very first time.

• How does a swimming pool feel having people jump into it every day?

• What if your pet cat or dog could talk? What might they say to you?

Such thoughts have always intrigued and inspired poets to come up with the most creative verses. After some of my students wrote poems in personification form, they printed them on large sheets of oaktag and illustrated them with colorful collages using photographs from magazines. I then placed the finished works in a hallway display titled "What if..." for the entire school to enjoy.

Reference shelf
In the Spin of Things: Poetry of Motion by Rebecca Kai Dotlich (Boyds Mills Press, 2003). A pencil sharpener that "whittles and whirs/with cravings/for shavings...;" puppets whose "...wobbly knees/move to the music of make-believe...;" and a kitchen broom who is a "sweeping soldier" are among the 23 selections in this clever book of rhymed wordplay.

Fireflies at Midnight by Marilyn Singer (Atheneum, 2003). From an early-morning otter to a red fox at nighttime, 14 creatures tell about various aspects of their lives.

Lee Bennett Hopkins is a distinguished poet and anthologist. His recent collection is Wonderful Words: Poems About Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening (Simon & Schuster, 2004).