Question

Personification is a figure of speech that attributes human qualities to inanimate things and abstract ideas. How has it been used in the poem?

Answer 1

Padma Sachdev is a Dogri poet that is close to her indigenous language. In her poem Mother Tongue, she is in a melancholic mood for her language is depreciating and that its script has died away. She is admiring her mother tongue Dogri and its native script Sharade and praises it in leaps and bounds. She calls it a “very kind Shahni”, a benevolent mistress, who is always ready to help any author or poet, “ever ready to do her bidding”. Padma transcends the furthest boundary and praises Dogri as if it were the queen of all languages, an empress who is served by all the literature folk and scripts calling them all “her servants”. However, Dogri is just one of many languages spoken in the whole of India. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages in India and is spoken in the Jammu province of J and K and in Northern Himachal and in Azad Kashmir (Neelum Valey). Even the scripts join in and admit that they all are servants of Dogri and helps the poet by giving her a new quill.