Personifications Purpose in Poetry

In Claude McKay’s “America”, McKay chooses to personify two main things. First, and most adamantly, he personifies America. Second, he personifies time. He uses personification to help the reader see how he views these two extremely broad concepts.

The first thing he personifies is America. He describes it as having many different qualities of humanity that he believes will allow him to relay his feelings towards America in a much more understandable way. He also has to use personification to get all his feelings across in the constraints of a poem. He must relay everything he is feeling in a relatively few number of lines. Personification allows him to do this. Lines 1-3 illustrate this point. “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, / And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth.” McKay he gets across a plethora of ideas in three small lines. He states that she feeds me bread of bitterness to tell that America much like a parent provides for him, but at the same time does not give him everything that he desires. McKay, as a child, does not always understand the actions of America, but at the same time the parent is well intended. The next line he reveals more to the reader by saying that America sometimes feels like a tiger clamping down on his throat. He is most certainly talking about the oppression of his race. By personifying America McKay can relay his message in a much more visual way than prose. “Sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth” is a much more visual way to express the oppression he is feel than simply stating, “I feel oppressed.”

McKay also personifies time. Here he does it for a different reason. Time is a very ambiguous notion and it is not easy in writing to grasp the concept. This is especially true of a poem where the poet has to work within a narrow window of words. McKay’s solution is to personify time as a never unmovable hand that once set into motion can never be stopped.

So personification is used by McKay to both make the poem more visual, and to help him to relay the ambiguity of time in a single poem.