Pundemic

In Competition No. 3063 you were invited to submit a poem about puns containing puns.
 
Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan.
 
Robert Schechter’s four-liner — ‘Opun and shut’ — caught my eye:

As the punster’s puns
were reaching a crescendo,
I said, ‘Take your puns
and stick them innuendo!’

Also displaying considerable punache were Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Sylvia Fairley, Michael Jameson and Joseph Houlihan. They narrowly lost out to the winners, printed below, who pocket £25 apiece. W.J. Webster snaffles the extra fiver.

‘No hurry,’ said the nurse, ‘more haste less peed.’
Or did she? Words I find may mix and match:
I hear my hair is starting to re-seed,
While thinking, ‘Alopecia, goodbye thatch.’
A girl I knew once (when I was hirsuter)
Liked being chased to titillate and tease;
She lost me in a forest, being cuter —
I couldn’t see the wooed there for the trees.
A well-made play on words will conjure smiles,
Though some dismiss such handiwork as sleight;
Heigh-ho! The field of humour’s full of styles,
And blinkered eyes may come to see delight.
It is the way that Tom hoodwinks for fun,
And Oscar gives an earnest of his art;
It showed Donne in his cell not all undone,
And penetrated Shakespeare’s every part.
W.J. Webster
 
Though critics, averse to a verse about puns,
Like windows, see puns as a pain,
One humouring humour, a pun never shuns
Nor refrains from a funny refrain;
In refrains, wholly holy, Donne, penning a pun,
Plucks fun like a lyre from his name,
‘And having done that,’ he exclaims, ‘thou hast done.’
To play upon words he was game.
The bard too bombards us with puns on ‘goodbyes’
As when breathing his last in the mire,
‘You shall find me a grave man,’ Mercutio sighs,
Whilst respiring about to expire;
Like lawyers, a good pun will always appeal,
Or like strata, bring tiers to the eyes,
Like fishermen, cause us with laughter to reel
And like wheat, spring a corny surprise.