Examining Pathetic Fallacy | With Examples

Pathetic fallacy is a literary device that can be described as a form of personification. It involves assigning human emotions to inanimate objects or nature. The term was first coined by John Ruskin, a literary critic from the Victorian era. 

He employed the term to criticize a specific tendency in Romantic era poets to project their emotions onto the world of nature. The term now is used with no negative connotations. One of the more famous examples of pathetic fallacy is from Wordsworth’s “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (published in 1807): 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

In the poem, Wordsworth is describing coming across a patch of daffodils. He describes them as “dancing in the breeze” and “Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” The poet is projecting his feelings of happiness and joy upon the daffodils and even describes them as “jocund company.”

This type of pathetic fallacy is common, even in everyday speech. For example, we often hear about an “angry storm” or “sad drops of rain.” All of these examples include projecting emotions onto nature. 

In literature, pathetic fallacy is often used as metaphor or personification and to establish mood and atmosphere. In this article, we take a closer look at pathetic fallacy, how it differs from personification, and provide some examples of the device, including from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. 

Pip and Magwich, by Charles Green, 1898

What is a pathetic fallacy? 

Pathetic fallacy is the literary practice of attributing human emotion to nature, inanimate objects, or animals. It is a type of personification that has been used for a long time in literature, especially poetry. 

One could say that certain pathetic fallacies have been used so often in literature that they have even become cliches. For example, the smiling or dancing flowers (in the Wordsworth poem we quoted earlier), angry winds, sad rains, or happy birds singing. 

Pathetic fallacy can be described as a form of personification. However, not all personification is pathetic fallacy. Pathetic fallacy always involves attributing emotions to something that is non-human, whereas personification projects any human attribute to an object. For more on the difference between the two, please check out this article: Pathetic Fallacy vs. Personification.

Examples of pathetic fallacy

Our first example of pathetic fallacy is from John Donnes’ poem “The Sun Rising” (1633). It is a poem where Donne chides the sun. I will reproduce the first stanza of the poem here. 

1. Donne, “The Sun Rising” (published in 1633):

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

               Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

               Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

               Late school boys and sour prentices,

         Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,

         Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

In this poem,  the poet is portraying the sun as a pedantic old man or rather a “saucy pedantic wretch,” who is too serious about his job of waking people up. Donne is lying in bed with his lover and does not want to be disturbed by the rising sun. 

In his words, love knows “no season . . . nor clime, Nor hours, days, [nor] months.” He wants to stay in bed forever with his lover and so comes up with an imaginative conceit, where the sun is supposed to make an exception for those in love as love is a world in and of itself separate from the everyday world of school boys, huntsmen, and country ants. 

In the process, the sun is personified into an old man who is pedantic in his job of waking people up to start work. If the sun were not such a “pedantic wretch” and “busy old fool,” he should have known to make an exception for lovers such as Donne. 

2. Dickens, Great Expectations

Our second example of pathetic fallacy is from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (published in 1861). It is a scene from Chapter 39, just before Pip encounters Magwitch:

Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East . . . . So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

The gusts of wind are described as furious, as well as “rages of wind.” The rain is also described as “violent.” Charles Dickens is using pathetic fallacy here to create atmosphere. Something dramatic is about to happen. Pip, the main character of the play, is about to learn that his benefactor for several years is an escaped criminal, and not the genteel aristocrat he imagined. 

Such a revelation can be described as violent, as it violates Pip’s expectations. Attributing violence and anger to the weather is not simply a cliche here as used by Charles Dickens. Instead, it can be described as an attempt to prepare the readers for the threats of violence that  Pip is about to encounter in that chapter. 

3.  Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” 

Our third example is from Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole” (published in 1917):

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

In this poem, Yeats is attributing to the swans human passion and ambition. The poem portrays the swans as a symbol of eternal youth, beauty, and passion. Yeats is growing old and fears that one day he will lose such passion and desire. 

The birds then are used as a kind of juxtaposition. They are portrayed as the opposite of what he fears to become, an old man who is no longer inspired by art, beauty, or passion. We can say that Yeats is using pathetic fallacy here to turn an object in nature into a sophisticated and subtle symbol.

4. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

The fourth example of pathetic fallacy is from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (published in 1847). The passage just like the example from Dickens uses pathetic fallacy to describe the weather: 

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

This passage occurs at the beginning of the novel. It sets the tone for what is ultimately a dark tale that features a mad woman in an attic, her suicide, and a horrific fire that leads to one of the main characters being disfigured. Therefore, the “sombre clouds” brought in by the cold winter can be seen as setting the tone for the novel’s grim themes and events. 

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5. Arnold, “To Marguerite Continued”

Our last example is from Matthew Arnold’s poem “To Marguerite Continued (published in 1857): 

But when the moon their hollows lights,

And they are swept by balms of spring,

And in their glens, on starry nights,

The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour—

Oh! then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent!

This example is more similar to the one from Yeats. Here, pathetic fallacy isn’t simply being used as a cliche. The poet is projecting the human emotion of despair and loneliness on the British islands. The British isles are portrayed as individuals who were separated from the continent of Europe and who now long to be reunited. 

This is why Arnold talks about a “longing like despair” because the islands feel that they were once “Parts of a single continent.” Of course, we know that the islands don’t truly feel this way. Arnold is simply using the isles as a symbol of the loneliness of the human condition. 

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, June  02). Examining Pathetic Fallacy | With Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/pathetic-fallacy