"Water, water, everywhere" but not a "drop to drink"

"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains" ("Ozymandias," 10-12).

This is irony of the situational variety. King Ozymandias is "mighty," "cold," and "wrinkled"; those conceptions of him have survived for centuries since he ruled Ancient Egypt. Simultaneously, the words on the pedestal recall Ozymandias's "mighty works"; those works are nowhere to be seen. We expect Ozymandias's mighty works to remain because of his aforementioned power and might, but instead, the sand around his crumbled statue is "boundless and bare" (13).

In Ozymandias's case, people remembered the "despair" of his cruel tyranny longer than his "mighty works" lasted. It's a nice reminder that though our attitudes are not exactly immortal, our material accomplishments are certainly more mortal.

So, I was reading the introduction to situational irony, and I came across the example "water, water, everywhere" but not a "drop to drink." Like what happened with Ozymandias, this is the opposite of what we would expect to happen. I felt pretty cool because I knew exactly where this reference originated -- in Hank Green's song "This is Not Harry Potter."

(There was some verbal irony in that last sentence.)