Puns—the source of many eye-roll-inducing jokes on popsicle sticks—might be seen as too low-brow for literature. However, the third stanza of “Island Man” contains an important pun, which encapsulates the rupture between the island the man dreams of and his current life in London. The couplet “comes back to sands / of a grey metallic soar” might not make much sense when read literally, but replace “sands” for sounds and hear the “surge of wheels” and the “dull north circular roar.” By playing on the homophone between sands and sounds, Nichols recreates the mishearing central to the poem, where the island man mistakes the sound of traffic for the sound of the ocean.
There is a rich tradition of puns, also known as paronomasia or play-on-words, in poetry and literature. Lewis Carrol Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is full of puns that encapsulate the backward dreamland of Wonderland. “You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—” says Alice. To which the Duchess interrupts: “Talking of axes, chop off her head!” Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest contains a pun within the title. The play consists of several characters pretending they are someone named Ernest—and in doing so, they are being anything but earnest. Shakespeare has many famous examples, lots of which are sexual innuendos. The title of Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing also contains layers of meaning via pun. As Megan Garber elucidates in an article for The Atlantic, “In Elizabethan English, the word 'nothing' was pronounced as 'no-ting,' and it suggested our modern sense of 'noting' as 'noticing' (and even as spying),” which is a major theme in the play. Furthermore, “nothing” was also a euphemism for female genitalia during Shakespeare’s time. In this way, there are three meanings within four words.
Like in Nichols’ poem “Island Man,” single-word puns can also imply powerful double meanings and create ambiguity within a poem. Within “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” by William Wordsworth, there could be a pun in the last line, based on how one interprets the word “lying.” Wordsworth is known for being a bard of the natural world and his poems are filled with imagery from rural England. In this poem, however, Wordsworth lauds the urban metropolis of London during the early morning: “Earth has not any thing to show more fair.” He describes it as “a sight so touching in its majesty.” The final line is “And all that mighty heart is lying still!” which could be right in line with the rest of his praise about the beauty of the sleeping city. However, if lying is interpreted as being untruthful, all of the previous praise is thrown into question. In a way that resonates with the confusion in "Island Man" between the sounds of traffic and the sounds of the sea, perhaps Wordsworth sees falseness within the city's seeming beauty.
