The nonce sonnet has been described as "a poem, generally of fourteen lines, rhyming by no set pattern, which suggests the sonnet form by its rhetorical
unity and closure and by the intricacy of its construction." (from The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, edited by
Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta).
At his Web site dedicated to the sonnet, Tex Norman writes that, "The word nonce comes from the medieval expression for the nonce, meaning for the one time. Thus a nonce word is a word used for a special circumstance only. So a nonce sonnet would be a changed sonnet form created for one unique occasion."
The Robert Frost Encyclopedia mentions Frost's poems, "Mowing," "Hyla Brook," and "The Oven Bird." These poems all use fairly regular meter, but unconventional rhyme schemes. As the authors say: "Frost's "Mowing," for example, rhymes abc abd ec dfeg fg, allowing one and only one rhyme for each end word, and never rhyming within a small syntactical unit, repeating a rhyme pattern, or placing a rhyme within two lines of its partner until the final line. Such distant, almost inaudible rhyme seems to reinforce the message of "Mowing," in which the speaker listens to the real, wordless whisper of a scythe rather than any fantasy of speech." Here's the poem, "Mowing."
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
However, many contemporary nonce sonnets depart even more from the traditional sonnet form. Here are a few examples.
Futility
by Wilfred Owen
Move him into the sun --
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, --
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved -- still warm -- too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall? --
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
Take-off
by Katherine Gallagher
(after a line by Derek Walcott)
Have you seen the way the day grows
around you, neither perpendicular
nor horizontal -
open to whims, new currents,
the sky inviting banks of cloud,
stubborn vaults of air?
How it keeps you balancing
like that angel on a pinhead,
your feet facing all ways into the poem!
You follow it, you're the wind, a gale,
path escalating - you're sure
the day has you in its sights.
And you welcome it, ready
to be astonished.
(from Fourteen Magazine, Issue 7
The Ten Thousand Things
"A person can hold seven items in the mind at once."
I think (one) to write about these seven things
my mind can hold: (two) a slice of cold Mutsu,
the quick spurt (three) of tart-sweet juice,
(four) the thought of taste budding on my tongue's
nubbly surface (five), to seek to find the certain
word for fruit dissolving in the mouth,
or something (six) not apple, like the truth,
or sunlight pouring amber (seven) through a curtain.
By the time I come to know of these, they're gone;
but words they spawn wing through my mind, following
the leader over the edge of moment like wild geese:
one sea, its drops-one field, a million spikes of grass--
a sky of unseen stars are jumbled in the time
this poem took to write: what flocks, what birds, have flown?
-Ann Silsbee, from Orioling, Red Hen Press 2003,
and reprinted in Mezzo Cammin.
Diane Lockward comments (at Mezzo Cammin): "While this arrangement of setup and follow-up is characteristic of the Petrarchan sonnet, the rhyme scheme simply does not conform. Nor do we have the traditional sonnet's iambic pentameter. The iambic foot dominates, but Silsbee, a composer and pianist, has the musician's ear for counterpoint. The first two lines scan as perfect iambic pentameter, but only if the numbers in parenthesis are disregarded; the last three lines scan as perfect iambic hexameter. The lines in between vary in the number of syllables and pattern of stresses. It seems, then, that Silsbee has given us a 14-line stanza with variable rhyme pattern and meter, i.e., a nonce sonnet, here a delightful combination of tradition and variation."
Here are a couple by Molly Peacock:
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I've sought--
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold--and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.
From: Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems
and posted at this University of Toronto Library page.
Marriage
I watch my husband at a party,
a shy boy become a man at ease at last.
Success freshens his face, the boy now free
to pass beneath his expressions
as if slipping under a fence.
I used to slip under a fence
to swim in a stream-fed pond
and laze in the water till shocked
and delighted by a cold spot I swam through.
That's what his face is like,
infused by a source inside him.
I know I have a part in it,
just as I was part of the pond
where I loved to swim.
from The Second Blush: Poems
Fishouse Poems (an audio archive)
Birthday
by Henri Cole
When I was a boy, we called it punishment
to be locked up in a room. God's apparent
abdication from the affairs of the world
seemed unforgivable. This morning,
climbing five stories to my apartment,
I remember my father's angry voice
mixed up with anxiety & love. As always,
the possibility of home--at best an ideal--
remains illusory, so I read Plato, for whom love
has not been punctured. I sprawl on the carpet,
like a worm composting, understanding things
about which I have no empirical knowledge.
Though the door is locked, I am free.
Like an outdated map, my borders are changing.
Cole has called this poem a "birthday poem to myself." You can hear him read it at The Atlantic.
At his Web site dedicated to the sonnet, Tex Norman writes that, "The word nonce comes from the medieval expression for the nonce, meaning for the one time. Thus a nonce word is a word used for a special circumstance only. So a nonce sonnet would be a changed sonnet form created for one unique occasion."
The Robert Frost Encyclopedia mentions Frost's poems, "Mowing," "Hyla Brook," and "The Oven Bird." These poems all use fairly regular meter, but unconventional rhyme schemes. As the authors say: "Frost's "Mowing," for example, rhymes abc abd ec dfeg fg, allowing one and only one rhyme for each end word, and never rhyming within a small syntactical unit, repeating a rhyme pattern, or placing a rhyme within two lines of its partner until the final line. Such distant, almost inaudible rhyme seems to reinforce the message of "Mowing," in which the speaker listens to the real, wordless whisper of a scythe rather than any fantasy of speech." Here's the poem, "Mowing."
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
However, many contemporary nonce sonnets depart even more from the traditional sonnet form. Here are a few examples.
Futility
by Wilfred Owen
Move him into the sun --
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, --
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved -- still warm -- too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall? --
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
Take-off
by Katherine Gallagher
(after a line by Derek Walcott)
Have you seen the way the day grows
around you, neither perpendicular
nor horizontal -
open to whims, new currents,
the sky inviting banks of cloud,
stubborn vaults of air?
How it keeps you balancing
like that angel on a pinhead,
your feet facing all ways into the poem!
You follow it, you're the wind, a gale,
path escalating - you're sure
the day has you in its sights.
And you welcome it, ready
to be astonished.
(from Fourteen Magazine, Issue 7
The Ten Thousand Things
"A person can hold seven items in the mind at once."
I think (one) to write about these seven things
my mind can hold: (two) a slice of cold Mutsu,
the quick spurt (three) of tart-sweet juice,
(four) the thought of taste budding on my tongue's
nubbly surface (five), to seek to find the certain
word for fruit dissolving in the mouth,
or something (six) not apple, like the truth,
or sunlight pouring amber (seven) through a curtain.
By the time I come to know of these, they're gone;
but words they spawn wing through my mind, following
the leader over the edge of moment like wild geese:
one sea, its drops-one field, a million spikes of grass--
a sky of unseen stars are jumbled in the time
this poem took to write: what flocks, what birds, have flown?
-Ann Silsbee, from Orioling, Red Hen Press 2003,
and reprinted in Mezzo Cammin.
Diane Lockward comments (at Mezzo Cammin): "While this arrangement of setup and follow-up is characteristic of the Petrarchan sonnet, the rhyme scheme simply does not conform. Nor do we have the traditional sonnet's iambic pentameter. The iambic foot dominates, but Silsbee, a composer and pianist, has the musician's ear for counterpoint. The first two lines scan as perfect iambic pentameter, but only if the numbers in parenthesis are disregarded; the last three lines scan as perfect iambic hexameter. The lines in between vary in the number of syllables and pattern of stresses. It seems, then, that Silsbee has given us a 14-line stanza with variable rhyme pattern and meter, i.e., a nonce sonnet, here a delightful combination of tradition and variation."
Here are a couple by Molly Peacock:
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I've sought--
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold--and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.
From: Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems
and posted at this University of Toronto Library page.
Marriage
I watch my husband at a party,
a shy boy become a man at ease at last.
Success freshens his face, the boy now free
to pass beneath his expressions
as if slipping under a fence.
I used to slip under a fence
to swim in a stream-fed pond
and laze in the water till shocked
and delighted by a cold spot I swam through.
That's what his face is like,
infused by a source inside him.
I know I have a part in it,
just as I was part of the pond
where I loved to swim.
from The Second Blush: Poems
Fishouse Poems (an audio archive)
Birthday
by Henri Cole
When I was a boy, we called it punishment
to be locked up in a room. God's apparent
abdication from the affairs of the world
seemed unforgivable. This morning,
climbing five stories to my apartment,
I remember my father's angry voice
mixed up with anxiety & love. As always,
the possibility of home--at best an ideal--
remains illusory, so I read Plato, for whom love
has not been punctured. I sprawl on the carpet,
like a worm composting, understanding things
about which I have no empirical knowledge.
Though the door is locked, I am free.
Like an outdated map, my borders are changing.
Cole has called this poem a "birthday poem to myself." You can hear him read it at The Atlantic.
