The Personification of Phaedrus

In a portion of Phaedrus, beauty and the growth of wings upon the soul are examined through a distinct use of personification and correlations between the examined and nature.

Personification plays a great role in how Socrates narrates the description of beauty. Firstly, the pronoun “she” is given as a title when referring to beauty; similarly to when a ship is referred to with the feminine pronoun. Socrates reports that he, “…saw her there shining” (7). This is a distinct personification of beauty as beauty itself cannot sparkle, yet Socrates repeatedly portrays beauty as a living entity.Perhaps he does such as to make it seem more plausible for beauty to be the cause of the formation of wings upon the soul. In the human mind that which is non-living is found to be subject to much more scrutiny when it is the cause of such a profound effect upon something as ethereal as a soul. So possibly,Socrates personifies beauty to allow for a more openness to the idea of the growth of a soul's wings from such a thing as profound as true beauty.

Plant-like imagery is evoked from the mind as the description of the growth of the soul’s wings unfolds. A distinct correlation to nature, in the process of a growing plant, can be drawn to the way Socrates explains the development of the soul. As the soul gazes upon beauty,through eyes which are the, “…windows of the soul”, the soul is warmed and its formerly hard encasing which blocked the formation of wings is softened. This can be paralleled to the development of a seedling when beauty takes the form of the sun, which warms the seedling and softens its casing which blocked the formation of roots. In the next stage of the souls wing development,”…nourishment streams upon [it and] the lower end of the wings begin to swell and grow from the roots upward” (8) the imagery of the soul sprouting wings that grow upward from roots is clear in its plant like imagery. The correlation drawn between the development of a plant and the development of the winged soul could be a reinforcement of the idea that a soul is organic and cannot be made,just as plants cannot be conjured by man out of nothing.