Pathetic fallacy

It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent.

"[9] Ruskin coined the term pathetic fallacy to help explain his theory of the role of truth in art.

"[6] While Ruskin's essay plainly praises and disparages use of the pathetic fallacy in various contexts, his phrase has been remembered as a "pejorative",[10] used to criticize the sentimentality that was common to the poetry of the late 18th century, especially among poets like Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.

"[11] However Tennyson, in his own poetry, began to refine and diminish such expressions, and introduced an emphasis on what might be called a more scientific comparison of objects in terms of sense perception.

The old order was beginning to be replaced by the new just as Ruskin addressed the matter, and the use of the pathetic fallacy began markedly to disappear.

"[12] The following, a stanza from the poem "Maud" (1855) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, demonstrates what John Ruskin, in Modern Painters, said was an "exquisite" instance of the use of the pathetic fallacy:[12] There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate.