Discuss the use of personification in the following quote from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: ''Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.''

By making 'love' the subject of the sentence, love itself is seen to do the action of 'looking'. This is an example of personification: a human quality is being given to a non-human thing; in this case, love. This has the effect of making clearer what it means to say that love is blind: it takes control from the original subject, Bottom.

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Answered by Robert F. English tutor

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