Mapping the mind and the body: on W.H. Auden's personifications - Critical Essay

Style, Fall, 2002 by Craig A. Hamilton

"The will of one by being two At every moment is denied."

(W. H. Auden, "The Sea and The Mirror," Collected 413)

1. Introduction: Mind, Body, and Personification

Despite our traditional view of the body and mind as divided, one figurative way for representing the two in our thought and in our language is the unified method of metaphor. For example, because we have easier access to bodies than to minds, our everyday notion of body language means we "map" from the body to the mind to interpret the behavior of others. As Simon Baron-Cohen has argued, this normal psychological mapping provides us with a "theory of mind" that some autistic children appear to lack for successful social cognition. We may not be fully aware of such mappings, but they conceptually link the body to the mind, making the body indexical of the mind in a way that closely integrates them and nearly negates dualism. Apart from these non-verbal mappings, mappings from the body to the mind in language, according to Eve Sweetser, motivate how physical verbs like grasp take on mental meanings like "know" during a language's evolution. As we would imagine, these connections between mind and body, between the mental and physical, also appear in literature, particularly in bodily descriptions, the language of emotions, and the use of mind or body metaphors. W. H. Auden is one case in point since he was forever writing about the mind and the body in his poems. Usually, Auden depicts body and mind in general via metaphor and personification in particular. What makes Auden's mind and body personifications strange, however, is that they are unlike the imaginary abstractions we often associate with personification.

Personification was vital to Auden. According to Bernard Bergonzi, the four main features of Auden's poetic style were the "copious use of the definite article; unusual adjectives and adjectival phrases; surprising similes, which have a reductive or trivializing effect; and personified abstractions" (70). Indeed, Auden's personified abstractions bothered readers like Karl Shapiro, who wrote in his 1947 Essay on Rime, "An all-purpose abstraction is a form / Dear to the tired mind that must malinger / And precious to the talentless [...] History is but one / Of Auden's ill-starred words. Luck is another" (qtd. in Bergonzi 68). Irvin Ehrenpreis also found that "Auden at his best did not stop at personification; he embodied the abstractions in curious or supreme examples" such as southern Italy's limestone landscapes in the poem "In Praise of Limestone" (498-99). Shapiro, Bergonzi, and Ehrenpreis have all recognized Auden's tendency to personify and embody abstractions. However, Auden also tended to personify the mind and the body, entities which are perhaps less abstract than we recognize.

We personify when we metaphorically ascribe agency to normally inanimate objects, turning non-existent or imaginary entities into realistic actors or agents. As the cognitive linguist would describe it, to personify is to "map" information from a "source domain" onto a "target domain" (what I. A. Richards once called vehicles and tenors). Mapping occurs simultaneously at conceptual and linguistic levels. Novel metaphors in language often reflect conventional metaphors in thought. In eroding classical boundaries between figures of thought and figures of speech, personification is apt for study from the cognitive viewpoint because a metaphor in language normally reveals a related conceptual metaphor in thought (Gibbs 311). Simply put, one metaphor can hide another. Therefore, it is fruitful to consider personification as both a product of thought and a product of speech.

Personification is one of our most basic and frequently utilized metaphors. Its high frequency in children's literature suggests that we can understand it very early in life and that it is our "prototypical metaphor" built from "nonhuman topic--human vehicle" mappings (MacKay 87). Not surprisingly, the same holds for Auden, who presumably knew that the personification of abstractions in literature reached its apex in eighteenth-century English poetry. The figure seemed to fall into disuse after Wordsworth's radical break with the trend in "Yew Trees" (Knapp 128). Personified abstractions that allegedly functioned allegorically, popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were therefore more or less abandoned by the Romantics. As Steven Knapp has suggested, personifications such as Sin or Death in Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, became problematic in the eyes of eighteenth century writers. The view that personification as a poetic device could no longer be easily defended followed from the divisi on between "arbitrary magic" and "rational Aristotelian mimesis" for critics like Addison and from Lord Kames's separation of the "natural" personification of "insensible objects" from the "unnatural" personification of "deities, angels, devils, or other supernatural powers" (Knapp 60-61). Since no Romantic would have wanted willingly to write seemingly "unnatural" poems, "natural" "mimesis" was apparently preferred. The issue, as Knapp puts it, was no minor one: