Two levels of irony

In yesterday's blog post, I shared the poem Roger Heston by Edgar Lee Masters. In it, Masters integrated the literal and imaginative realms in a seamless way. It's an example of double irony. Masters used two levels of irony to subtly indicate to his readers that he wrote the poem with "tongue in cheek."

Irony results when a writer twists the meaning of his words. A poem can contain two levels of irony. For example, at Roger Heston's base level, the speaker unexpectedly gets gored to death by a cow he was observing; At its higher level, the person writing about the speaker's untimely demise is none other than the speaker himself. A bit of afterlife communication.