PERSONIFICATION - learn it, live it, love it

The first four stanzas of W.H. Auden’s After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics are a series of metaphors comparing the “futility and grime” as well as the “better time” of human beings to that of the physicist’s objective descriptions of “the Greater Nebulae” and the “atoms in our brains.” In each stanza, the narrator juxtaposes the inherently flawed, human subjective experience with human attempts at objective understanding; the narrator also suggests that the human subjective experience is better suited to humans than the objective, impersonal experience of subatomic particles which could break a loved one’s neck without subjective recognition.

In the second stanza, the speaker uses the personification and visual imagery of particles to argue that, despite the serious short-comings of the subjective human experience, including, for example, the experience of marriage (“rarely bliss”), particles are still “worse” off than humans because they cannot love, feel the tenderness of a kiss, or recognize their impact on one another. This instance of personification is particularly tricky because the speaker uses personification of atoms to prove that atoms are not like people.

1
1 A If all a top physicist knows
2 B About the Truth be true,
3 A Then, for all the so-and-so's,
4 C Futility and grime,
5 D Our common world contains,
6 C We have a better time
7 B Than the Greater Nebulae do,
8 D Or the atoms in our brains.
2
9 A Marriage is rarely bliss
10 B But, surely it would be worse
11 C As particles to pelt
12 D At thousands of miles per sec
13 B About a universe
14 A Wherein a lover's kiss
15 C Would either not be felt

16 D Or break the loved one's neck.
3
17 A Though the face at which I stare

18 B While shaving it be cruel
19 C For, year after year, it repels
20 D An ageing suitor, it has,
21 D Thank God, sufficient mass
22 A To be altogether there,
23 B Not an indeterminate gruel
24 C Which is partly somewhere else.
4
25 A Our eyes prefer to suppose
26 B That a habitable place
27 C Has a geocentric view,
28 A That architects enclose
29 B A quiet Euclidian space:
30 C Exploded myths - but who
31 D Could feel at home astraddle
32 D An ever expanding saddle?
5
33 A This passion of our kind
34 B For the process of finding out
35 B Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
36 C But I would rejoice in it more
37 D If I knew more clearly what
38 C We wanted the knowledge for,
39 A Felt certain still that the mind
40 D Is free to know or not.
6
41 A It has chosen once, it seems,
42 B And whether our concern
43 A For magnitude's extremes
44 C Really become a creature
45 D Who comes in a median size,
46 C Or politicizing Nature
47 D Be altogether wise,
48 B Is something we shall learn.