Poem Analysis... Casual Wear by James Merrill?

Question

Where is the irony and what is the analysis of this poem?

Your average tourist: Fiftly. 2.3
Times married. Dressed, this year, in Ferdi Planthower
Originals. Odds 1 to 9
Against her strolling past the Embassy.

Today at noon. Your average terroist:
Twenty-five. Celibate. No use for trends,
At least in clothing. Mark, though, where it ends.
People have come forth made of colored mist.

Unsmiling on one hundred million screens
To tell of his promp phone call to the station,
"Claiming responsibility" - devestation
Signed with a flourish, like the dead wife's jeans.

Answer 1

This was one of my favorite high school poems. The irony is that it's rather unlikely (the odds are 1 to 9) that the wife tourist will be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the terrorist strikes, but that it is no less devastating when such terrorist-initiated death does occur.

Tourists are also often completely ignorant and oblivious of the true conditions of the people who live in the countries they visit (esp. Africa and the Middle East) and strut around in their stupidly overpriced designer clothes as though designer clothes mattered in life. (Ironically, little did she know while dressing in her pointlessly expensive clothes that she would die that day; if she had, she wouldn't have thought once about the designer clothes.) At the same time, of course, people three blocks away from the tourist attractions and expensive hotels full of white Americans and Europeans are starving or killing each other over religious rivalries or civil unrest.

Answer 2

Casual Wear James Merrill