A Pompous Man and His Shadow
The noon-day sun, caricaturist, Delighting in distortion, Appends to perpendicular pride A sense of due proportion.
Doyle Hennessy
SourceLicence:Public domain (US, unrenewed)
The noon-day sun, caricaturist, Delighting in distortion, Appends to perpendicular pride A sense of due proportion.
A proud man stands upright at midday, and the sun does something he would never do for himself: it shows him up. The speaker casts the sun as a caricaturist, an artist who exaggerates a person's features for laughs. Here the sun "delights in distortion," stretching or squashing the man's shadow into something comic. The shadow is the man's own shape turned into a cartoon, and that is the joke.
The last two lines make the point. The man's "perpendicular pride" is both his straight-backed posture and his inflated opinion of himself, and the shadow that falls from it gives him "a sense of due proportion." In other words, the sun quietly cuts him down to size.
The mood is light and wry. There is no anger here, only amusement. The speaker seems to enjoy watching vanity get gently deflated by something as ordinary as a shadow on the ground.