As the poem progresses, Shelley puts a new twist on the idea of personification. Or, more accurately, Shelley reverses the idea of personification by attaching inanimate qualities to the person speaking in apostrophe form to the west wind. In the fifth stanza of the poem, the second line asks, "what if my leaves are falling like its own" (Charters, p. 872). Here, the reader imagines the speaker as a tree himself. Still, Shelley applies aspects of human dissolution to inanimate objects where the speaker avers that he or she's thoughts are dead in the seventh line. In this line, the speaker has surrendered the idea of he or she's metamorphosis into a tree, but still compares their thoughts to "withered leaves" (Charters, p. 872).
Finally, in the fourth to last line of the poem, the speaker asks that their thoughts be "scatter(ed) as from an unextinguished hearth ashes and sparks" (Charters, p. 872). While he doesn't assign human characteristics to the speaker's thoughts through words, Shelley does create another alternative to personification. He transforms the speaker's intangible thoughts into something that can be held and more importantly, thrown. In these last few stanzas of the poem, Shelley still manages to leave the reader with a final reference to morbidity. The speaker's request creates an undeniable image of a human's ashes being scattered in the earth as some final rite of passage.
While Shelley's poem contains elements of the personification of various inanimate items, Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror", is written entirely in this form. The speaker of the poem is the mirror itself. Plath utilizes the idea of applying more emotional characteristics to this object than did Shelley. In the fourth line of the poem, the mirror claims that it is "not cruel, only truthful". Obviously, honesty is a trait specific to humans, however Plath gives the reader an opportunity to make a decision for themselves about the alleged intentions of a mirror.
