Words and weapons

In Competition No 2547 you were invited to write a poem or some prose ending with ‘The pen [or pun] is mightier than the sword’.

The tag comes from a play, Richelieu, by Lord Lytton, the 19th-century politician and writer remembered today, if at all, for The Last Days of Pompeii. The idea for the pun bit came when I read of a proposal to remove a statue in central London of General Charles Napier, the Victorian conqueror of Sind, who is remembered today, if at all, not for his feats of arms but for the one-word telegram ‘Peccavi’ (I have sinned) that he allegedly sent to his London masters.

In a big entry you divided fairly equally between penners and punners, while a few clever dicks chose to ignore the space between ‘pen’ and ‘is’. The winners, printed below, get £25; Frank McDonald’s piscatory paronomastic angle on the new Scots nets the bonus five puns.

Remember when the Scot was dour
And took up arms to have his say
At Flodden and Culloden Moor,
But muscle never won the day.
Old Scotia’s now a fishy plaice
Where salmon and sturgeon think they’re brill;
They carp against the English mace
And nurse ambitions to go sole.
They swallow minnows, saw off jack
And chuckle as they take their charr;
They perch in wait and then attack
Convinced that salmon has no parr.
These finny folk have found a ray
Of sunshine in a witty word;
They’ve thrown their rusty dirks away:
The pun is mightier than the sword.
Frank McDonald
 
‘The pen is mightier than the sword’
(Example of metonymy)
Regrettably does not accord
With literal reality.
Old Bulwer-Lytton coined the phrase
(Though others had the thought before),
Claiming the written word outweighs
The iron panoply of war.
The heirs of Orwell or Voltaire
May write their brave polemics still,
But words, as Falstaff said, are air.