Four lines, one joke, and a surprisingly sharp moral: Doyle Hennessy's "A Pompous Man and His Shadow" packs a whole lesson in humility into the space of a single sentence. A proud man walks about at midday, and the sun, which has no respect for reputations, throws his shadow onto the ground in a shape that tells the truth about him. The poem is about the gap between how we imagine ourselves and how we actually appear, and about the way the world, if we let it, will quietly correct our self-image.
The cleverest move is the choice of the sun as an artist. Hennessy calls it a "caricaturist," and the word does a great deal of work. A caricaturist draws a person by exaggerating their features until the truth about them becomes impossible to miss: the big nose becomes enormous, the weak chin vanishes. The sun, "delighting in distortion," does the same to the pompous man. The word "delighting" is a nice touch, because it gives the sun a mischievous personality. It is not punishing the man out of malice; it is simply enjoying its own joke. That lightness keeps the poem from sounding preachy. We are invited to laugh rather than to wag a finger.
Then comes the second half, where the joke lands. The man's "perpendicular pride" is a wonderfully stiff phrase. "Perpendicular" is a geometer's word, cold and exact, and it suggests a man standing rigidly upright, chest out, chin high, a human ruler. Pride is imagined as posture. But the sun's low-angled or noon-lit artistry "appends" something to this posture, and "appends" is itself a slightly pompous, bookish verb, as if the poem is gently mimicking the man's own self-important vocabulary. What the sun attaches is "a sense of due proportion." Here the poem turns on a pun worth savouring. Proportion is a visual matter (the shadow has been drawn to scale, or at least to a scale that deflates him), but it is also a moral matter: to have a sense of proportion is to know your real size in the world. The shadow is a drawing and a lesson at once.
The irony deepens when we notice how the logic works. A shadow at noon is typically short and squat, and a caricature exaggerates, so the sun's "distortion" produces a figure that is stunted beside the man's tall self-regard. The distortion, paradoxically, is what makes things accurate. That is the quiet paradox at the heart of the poem: it takes an exaggeration to cure an exaggeration. The man's pride was the real distortion; the shadow merely answers it in kind.
The construction supports all of this. The poem is built from two rhymed pairs in short lines, with the second and fourth lines ending on "distortion" and "proportion," a rhyme that links the two key ideas and makes them feel like cause and cure. Those matching endings, with their long, formal "-tion" sounds, give the closing words a satisfying click, like a lid shutting on the punchline. The lines are indented in alternating pattern, which gives the poem a neat, epigrammatic look on the page, appropriate for something that behaves like a witty saying. The rhythm is brisk and fairly regular, which suits the tone of dry amusement; nothing here is rushed or strained, and the sentence flows across all four lines without a break, so the reader arrives at "proportion" with the sense of a point deftly made.
What makes the poem worth remembering is its economy. It takes an ordinary, everyday phenomenon, a shadow on the ground, and turns it into an image that sticks. The next time you notice your own shadow on a sunny day, you may find you cannot quite look at it innocently. And the poem's gentle target is not only the "pompous man" of the title. Anyone who has ever stood a little too tall in their own estimation may recognise the sun's handiwork.