The Virus

Personification is a figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to something nonhuman, typically inanimate objects or abstractions, like nature or nation. As a literary device, it is a form of anthropomorphism, a more general word for representing nonhuman entities as if they had human traits, emotions, or intentions. For example, a person anthropomorphizes their pet when they talk about it as if it were a human being. On a rhetorical level, personification can be limited to one phrase or sentence, as in “the smile of the sun” or “that last slice of pizza is calling my name.” On the other hand, it can also be the central device in a text, which is the case with Jericho Brown’s “The Virus.”

The most obvious human quality the virus has in this poem is its ability to speak, but it is even more significant that it projects a sense of agency and intention. In reality, a virus is merely a microscopic collection of genetic material (DNA or RNA) surrounded by a protein coat. It cannot replicate on its own but only when it infects cells of an organic host (human, animal, or plant) and uses its components to make copies of itself. Sometimes, in that process, it damages or kills the living organism it inhabits. Of course, none of that is deliberate activity, imbued with purpose or emotion; it is simply the biological function of viruses to do what they do. In the poem, however, the virus self-consciously desirers to kill and exudes hateful and pernicious emotions. This sense of willful evil makes it seem more threatening. It appears to plot its comeback rather than just lie dormant inside the host’s body. Personification turns these parasitic clusters of cells into a literary villain, like Shakespeare’s Iago scheming against Othello or even Satan himself conniving to bring about the fall of man.