Page 34 - The Irony Board

Section 2: Into the Body

Hope springs eternal
From the human breast;
But falls diurnal,
As you might have guessed.

If expectation reversed is the formula for irony, and expectation
itself is ultimately baseless, then hope and faith are human virtues
possessing a darker aspect of irony. Here Gluckman sets mushy
human nature against reality’s hard truths. We cannot function
without translating statistical probabilities into emotional certainties;
to do otherwise would undermine our will to live. But intelligence
produces knowledge of possible disaster as well as pictures of the
future according to plan or precedent. Irony is created by irrational
elements of personality suppressing one kind of knowledge in favor
of the other, setting the stage for disappointment.
The first half of the poem presents the necessary but logically
unjustified recurrence of optimism in the verbatim form of the well-
worn proverb. The sarcastic second couplet states the obvious, but
usually unexamined, corollary: if hope keeps springing up, then it
must also keep falling back. “Eternal” tends to gloss over the
repetitive nature of this phenomenon by giving it the character of a
continuous flow, as from a literal spring. “Diurnal” preserves the
incorrect part of speech of its rhyme while stressing reiteration, the
ironic element.

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