JAMES MERRILL’S FRIEND W. H. AUDEN wrote that ‘Good poets have a weakness for bad puns’. A punster himself, Auden needed it to be true. Most of his puns are of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind. At the end of ‘In Praise of Limestone’, he ironically sees ‘faultless love’ in a limestone landscape; in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, he refers to the Romantic poet’s muse as ‘gay’.1 Byron, also a consummate punster, had no wish or need to pun subtly: aroused from sleep and looking lustfully at Haidee, Don Juan ‘gazed as one who is awoke / By a distant organ’.2 Shakespeare punned even more indiscriminately than Byron. When accused of a cloudy disposition by his uncle-turned-evil-stepfather, Hamlet replies, ‘Not so, my lord, I am too much i’th’ sun’ (I. ii. 67). ‘Ask for me tomorrow’, says Mercutio, bleeding to death, ‘and you shall find me a grave man’ (Romeo and Juliet III. i. 93-4).3 Samuel Johnson registered Shakespeare’s ubiquitous ‘quibbles’ as defects while still admiring his gall: ‘A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it’.4 But for others, including the dying Keats, puns are a weakness worth having. He confesses in his final letter: ‘at my worst, even in Quarantine, [I] summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life’.5 For Keats – as for Auden – a weakness for puns could also constitute a strength.
