Irony in poetry uses discordance, incongruity, or a naïve speaker to convey a meaning beyond the literal. There are three types: verbal, situational, and dramatic. Poets use irony for satire or political points. Examples include “The Rape of the Lock,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and “My Last Duchess.”
Irony in poetry is a literary technique that uses discordance, incongruity, or a naïve speaker to say something other than the literal meaning of a poem. There are three basic types of irony used in poetry: verbal irony, situational irony, and dramatic irony. Poets will use irony for a variety of reasons, including satire or to make a political point. Irony can be hard to detect in poetry, but it’s a rhetorical device that students of poetry should always look for.
A common form of irony in poetry is verbal irony, in which a poet manipulates tone to say the opposite of what the poem actually says. This kind of irony, similar to sarcasm, is especially common in satire. A good example of verbal irony is “The Rape of the Lock”, by Alexander Pope. The poem uses the tone and conventions of epic poetry to describe the mundane scenario of a woman’s hair being cut. In describing an everyday event in a haughty tone, Pope scoffs at the pretensions of epic poetry, while also displaying the vanity of superficial beauty.
Another use of irony in poetry is in situational irony. Situational irony occurs when a poet uses a setting or metaphor that is incongruous with the content of the poem, causing the reader to see something new about the object at hand. A famous example of this kind of irony in poetry is found in TS Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which likens the evening to “a patient etherized on a table.” Taking a conventionally beautiful natural image and likening it to a painful medical procedure of modernity, Eliot uses situational irony to depict the loss of natural beauty in a corrupt world.
A poem may also contain dramatic irony, a type of irony in poetry in which a naïve speaker says something that has a meaning beyond his knowledge. This rhetorical device is most common in poetry which uses an unreliable speaker as the voice of the poem. A famous example of this kind of irony in poetry is Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” The poem is narrated by a duke describing the portrait of his ex-wife who died of supposed natural causes. Throughout the poem, the duke unknowingly hints that he killed her because of her uncontrollable jealousies, allowing the reader to see something about the duke that he would rather keep hidden.
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