Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic Fallacy, term for the poetic device of endowing the natural world with human feelings, motives, or actions. It was coined by John Ruskin in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856), where he denounced the tendency of poets to abandon the simple truth of nature for “extraordinary, or false appearances” generated by strong emotion or fancy. Since the pathetic fallacy is essentially a form of personification, it would not be hard to extend indefinitely the list of “morbid” examples Ruskin cited, particularly with quotations from 18th-century Romantic and Victorian poetry, such as:

The pathetic fallacy is also present in everyday idioms which speak of the Sun “smiling”, the sea being “angry”, or the weather being “grim”.