Domestic Personification

A lot of McGuckian's poems include references to common things in a woman's life--husbands, housekeeping, and children. She uses these familiar aspects to create unexpected imagery. Here's one of my favorites, from "The Return of Helen."

Being stored inside like someone's suffering,
Each piece of furniture now begins
To interpret every eye as sunlight.

This is a great example of personification--I get an immediate image of a dark room with the blinds drawn, and inside, carefully covered furniture wanting to escape. Normally, we write about the people IN the chairs...not the chairs themselves. By making the furniture seem like people, we get a new perspective.

McGuckian uses personification in a domestic context once again in "Another Son."

The sickly summer draped itself
Against the door like a yard child,
then climbed into me, pushing back
My sleep earlier than spring.

I'm not entirely sure what this means...what is a "yard child?" Still, though, I can picture "summer" kind of like the yellow fog in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The summer has taken a life of its own; usually, personification is for inanimate (but very tangible) objects, so it is unusual to use personification for a more abstract noun. McGuckian adds the image of the child, as well as the active verbs "climb" and "push" to offset the fact that it is difficult to quantify summer completely.

Here's a final example of the mixture of domestic themes and personification in "The Sitting":

In the kissed mouth I have given her,
As a woman's touch makes curtains blossom
Permanently in a house

Usually, the phrase is just "it has a woman's touch." McGuckian extends it, giving the curtains life as well. The personification takes a trite, boring phrase, and makes it interesting: since we think of curtains often having flowers, this line gives the image of them physically blossoming...I think that this is what we should do when writing poetry: take either an object, phrase, idea, etc. that the reader can certainly relate to--and then take it in a new direction that is surprising or thought-provoking.