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A night can be terrifying. But can it be said to be “cruel”? In what sense does a weeping willow weep? A dark night may hold unseen terrors, but it can't have sadistic intentions. A willow is only a tree. Its branches may droop but it cannot have feelings.
The attribution of human feeling, experience or intent to inanimate things is, strictly speaking, a fallacy: the pathetic fallacy. It's bad thinking, proceeding as it does from an implicit but incorrect premise. (Inanimate things don't have minds.) And it's a tactic contemporary poets generally try to avoid because it's seen as a cheap short cut to creating meaning, usually sentimental meaning. Although older poets, it must be said, the Romantics and Shakespeare among them, didn't seem to mind it so much.
And modern poets do sometimes play to great effect with pathetic fallacy. Here's a lovely example from William Carlos Williams:
Summer Song
Wanderer moon smiling a faintly ironical smile at this brilliant, dew-moistened summer morning,-a detached sleepily indifferent smile, a wanderer's smile,-if I should buy a shirt your color and put on a necktie sky-blue where would they carry me?
In “Summer Song” Williams seems almost to believe, as do we, that the moon is smiling ironically; that daybreak or no, this self-involved moon is going its own way. To be sure, the moon's smile is detached and indifferent. The poet senses and we do too that something is missing. The “faintly” would seem to signal that. Williams saves things with his last lines; this is his fantasy. We get it: He's the wanderer. (Although a wanderer in a shirt and tie! And in a fixed orbit. I guess that's the way doctors wander, or used to wander. On his day job, Williams, one of the great modern American poets, was a GP in New Jersey.)
In the history of the human race, awareness of the pathetic fallacy is a late arrival-the term coined by the critic John Ruskin in 1856. Ancient myth and primitive thought have always seen an animating presence in things: a