In such cases the pun is sometimes
transformed, for it only invariably exists where the words are equivocal
and where the allusion is peculiarly applicable to the double meaning
the falsity vanishes, and the verbal coincidence becomes an effective
ornament of style. It has been so used by the most successful writers,
and it is still under certain conditions approved; but more
discrimination is required in such embellishments than was anciently
necessary. And when the allusion becomes not only elegant but
iridescent, reflecting beautiful and changing lights, it rises into
poetical metaphor.
Falsity is necessary to constitute a pun; if no great identity is
assumed between the two words, and they are not introduced in a somewhat
strained manner, we do not consider the term applicable. If the use of
merely similar words in sentences were to be so viewed, we should be
constantly guilty of punning. Wordsworth was not guilty of a pun on that
hot day in Germany when, his friends having given him some hock, a wine
he detested, he exclaimed:
"In Spain, that land of priests and apes
The thing called wine doth come from grapes,
But where flows down the lordly Rhine
The thing called _gripes_ doth come from wine."
No doubt he intended to show a coincidence in coupling together two
words of nearly the same sound, but he represented the two things
signified as cause and effect, not as identical, so as to form a pun.
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