Transferred epithet.

You have to have a rash computer to write a transferred epithet. As the tired snowflakes of your memory float down outside the uncaring windows, why not reach for a comforting sip of consoling coffee and begin the beckoning work? The shortest day peeps round the corner its eyes dark, its hair tattered but invisible in the blue mists of the mothering Fen.

Things do not have emotions. That may hurt them, but they do not. They are just – things.
It is only people who do things that have emotions and characteristics.
If we transfer our own feelings onto the things round us, a wonderful, magic world peeps at us through the murk.

He smoked a thoughtful cigarette.
He had been given a careless haircut.
He ate a hurried breakfast.

Charles Dickens was the master of this.

Mr Jaggers never laughed: but he wore bright red creaking boots; and in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry suspicious way.
With Dickens you are right there in the threatening chambers looking up at Mr Jaggers in his terrifying boots.

It is great fun to carry this a lot further.

He walked through the nonchalant door into the welcoming street where merry cars hurried along beside the bustling pavements eager to get to their next appointment. The shops peered down, squinting through benign windows to see what the fuss was all about.

Writings with and without transferred epithets:

Compare these two poems about war:

This time it’s oil, not markets.
This time it’s oil, not borders.
This time it’s oil, not ideas.
This time it’s money and power –
like last time and every time before.

Steve Ely doing his levelbest for the poetry society.

Or

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all...

That is Wilfrid Owen. We are there. And some very kind person has noted all the places where careful pencils should notice the tell-tale words that will usher in that tantalising offer beckoning you, too, to the joyful world of drunken University.

A transferred epithet is for life, not just for Christmas.