Is this line from Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare an example of personification or antithesis?
That second answer at that link is completely wrong. And the first one is a bit confused. Personification involves attributing human thoughts or feelings or other human activities or characteristics to something that isn’t human. The thing personified can be a physical object (“The cruel sun glared at me angrily.”) or it can be some abstract concept (“Fortune smiled on me.”). In this case, Shakespeare personifies the concept of death, just as countless cartoonists have done by depicting death as a cloaked and hooded human figure carrying a scythe. Shakespeare attributes to death a human tendency to brag. That is the only personification in the line. The line doesn’t say that death wanders and it doesn’t say that death provides shade. (And in any case, those are not specifically human traits. A meandering stream wanders across the landscape. A tree provides shade.) The line says that “thou,” the beloved to whom the poem is addressed, will never wander in the shady realm of death — in o
