Songs with Personification

The first song that I chose was "Last Kiss," written by Wayne Cochran. It was brought back and performed again by several different artists, such as J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers & Pearl Jam. The first verse, in which two examples of personification appear, describes the car accident according to the narrator's memory. In the car ahead, "the engine was dead." An engine cannot literally die because it would not have been alive in the first place. In the imagery used to illustrate the crash, the narrator mentions "the screaming tires." Tires can make loud noises, but they cannot literally scream like a person screams. These human qualities are given to the parts of the cars to contribute to the tone. The narrator is describing a past event that he does not like to recall and which makes him feel helpless in the present.

I also chose the song "Brain Damage," by Pink Floyd. The beginning of the song describes the "lunatics." Personification is applied with the phrase, "The paper holds their folded faces to the floor." The ability to hold something is a human characteristic; a newspaper does not have hands to hold anything in. Like all other lyrics, there are numerous ways to translate the meaning of each line of this song. However, one possibility is that the paper is given this human quality to explain how it keeps the insane people insane.