But must such a lack of clarity inevitably be interpreted as a capitulation to the
pathetic fallacy? Consider, for example, this stanza from "Lines Written in Early Spring":
The various aspects of Ruskin's thought that comprise his realism have been ably and extensively treated in the existing scholarship; in particular, his turn from Romanticism in the explication of
pathetic fallacy is well established.
The discussions of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch both mention Eliot's use of
pathetic fallacy, female subjectivity, and the inextricable link between the women of the novels and the landscapes they inhabit.
(20) Most of them end up in psychoanalysis, made to prove another theory of traumatic omission, be it the return of the repressed (Day) or the melancholic compulsion (Auden) or the
pathetic fallacy (Armstrong and Tucker).
This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the
pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena.
The line also indicates another consequence of this new class of anaphora, that it has been engaging in an activity verging on
pathetic fallacy, on the lending of agency to the features of place.
Desperate to stand straight again, out from under the snow that bends their branches, the trees are described as "swaying weepers." The speaker reassures them that spring, with its rain and thaw, will "unburden you." These descriptions obviously indulge the
pathetic fallacy, a hallmark of traditional nature poetry that ecopoetics has striven to rethink because of its anthropocentrism.
There is actually a term for attributing human traits to inanimate things:
pathetic fallacy, but it's not really pathetic.
Seton's tendency to incorporate the
pathetic fallacy into his descriptions of animals at first seems at odds with Errington's sound biological principles.
She therefore revels in the exoticness of her subject matter: "with burkas covering most of their faces -- forehead, nose, mouth -- they looked like hawks about to peck the flesh of a kill." Her writing is poetic -- she thrives especially on
pathetic fallacy -- and, as one might expect from someone who conceives such a memorable literary conceit as the sand fish, imaginatively vivid.
It is
pathetic fallacy you long for--the roses nothing but