Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is the literary practice of giving human characteristics to animals or inanimate objects, as Li Po does here when he talks of the moon and his shadow as drinking companions. Usually, it is done in order to shed more light on the subject, by explaining its behavior in terms of human behaviors with which the reader is familiar. For instance, chemists might say that an atom that is missing two electrons "wants to bond" with one that has two extra ones to form a molecule: neither electron really has a desire, but phrasing their purely physical process in this way makes sense to humans, as if the two atoms were characters in a story. In this poem, anthropomorphism works in two ways. First, it shows how drinking wine can break down mental barriers, so that the speaker realizes all that he has in common with the moon...