Saturday Rave: nonet.

I've been writing about some short froms of literature, and have come to the nonet. (The word rhymes with sonnet.)

A nonet has, yes, nine lines, and the first line contains nine syllables. The next line has eight, and the next seven, and so on to the last line, with just one.

Rhyming is optional.

If this sounds a bit of a novelty, that's because it is. I haven't been able to find this meaning of the word in any of the major dictionaries, and all the examples I've found are modern (and copyright).

So here's one I made earlier.

They shout loud, with muscular voices
Their chants bouncing off the buildings.
All the people know their cause.
'Their hearts are huge,' men say
'Their heads full of truth!'

But here this child,
New, still, seems
No less
Wise.

Well, this poetry stuff probably needs a bit of practice...

(...having said that, my husband Roger, a man who has hardly read, let alone written, a poem in decades, came up with this on the back of an envelope:

The siren's scream dragged Fred from his bed
Panicked, he ran to the pit-head.
In the lift 'it's bad,' they said.
Along the seam men fled,
Their hearts grey with dread:
Then beams like lead
On his head
Poor Fred
Dead.

I post this here to encourage everyone, however clueless, to have a go.)


Word To Use Today: nonet. This word usually means a piece of music played by nine players, or the group of players themselves. The word comes from the Italian nonetto, from the Latin nōnus, nine.