Shakespeare's sonnet 61 addresses this issue head-on. The phrase "heavy
eyelids" innitially looks like an ordinary version of this kind of
transference, but over the course of the sonnet it becomes clear that the
speaker is increasingly aware of the problem of projecting emotions onto
objects, whether in the form of weariness onto eyelids or love onto an absent
love-object.
Quoting [log in to unmask]:
> I see that Marshall Grossman got there before me. I'd only add that I
> don't think that this is pathetic fallacy because this figure of speech
> does not depend on any concept of sympathy between the two nouns or
> whatever they denote. It just transfers the attribute to something else to
> produce a linguistic frisson rather than to suggest something more
> animistic about the world or to suggest a connection between animate and
> inanimate .
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Richard Ramsay
>
> > Thanks to those of you who have, amazingly enough, already responded.
> > But
> > isn't there a more specific term than "pathetic fallacy"? I'm thinking
> > of
> > a more condensed figure of speech in which, instead of a speaker's
> > imagining the external world responding to his or her emotions in kind, an
> > adjective signifying emotion is simply applied to an inanimate object
> > rather than to the human subject. The knights who leap out of their
> > roused
> > beds when they hear Malecasta's shrieks aren't mooning around like
> > Petrarchan lovers, imagining that their beds are sympathizing with them.
> >
> > Dot
> >
>
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