A sonnet about buying groceries sounds like a joke, and the poem seems to know it. Signed only "Leanne" and headed by nothing more than a row of asterisks, it takes one of poetry's most dignified containers, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, and fills it with apples, tomatoes and stewing beef. Its central idea is that a dull chore can be made magical by the way you look at it, and that the magic comes with a price tag.
The opening reads like a shopping list, but a very well-mannered one. "'Tis apples in the trolley first of all" sets an archaic "'Tis" beside a supermarket word, and that clash drives the poem's comedy. The speaker handles the tomatoes "gently lest they bruise", another old-fashioned "lest" that treats fruit with the courtesy of a courtier. The melons must be chosen "by firmest flesh", and "flesh" is a slightly startling word for fruit. It prepares us for the butcher's stall, where flesh is literal. The shopper is a connoisseur, and every choice is made to matter.
The rhyme scheme supports this. The octave runs *abba abba* on just two sounds, the *-all* of "all", "ball", "stall" and "enthrall", and the *-ooze* of "bruise", "choose", "peruse" and "stews". Having so few sounds to work with makes the stanza feel like a trolley circling the same aisles, returning to familiar ground. The poem is also playfully precise about its pleasures. "Rump, or chuck perhaps, for sweeter stews" is hesitation made audible, and the dash in "I must decide" is the speaker pausing at the counter. Then comes the exclamation, "oh, how those chops enthrall!" "Enthrall" belongs to spells and ballads, and applying it to pork chops is where the mock-grand tone peaks. We are probably meant to smile, though the delight sounds real enough.
The turn comes at line nine, as a sonnet's turn should. "A shopping day need not be dull or so / prosaic" is self-aware, since "prosaic" means ordinary and literally prose-like, and the poem is busy arguing for verse against prose. Its alternative is a row of "cardboard boxes grey / and grim that stand impassive, row by row". Judging by the imagery, these are presumably the packaged, unexciting goods the speaker would rather ignore. The boxes are personified as sullen sentries, and the hard consonants (*cardboard*, *grey*, *grim*) and the plodding "row by row" make the line itself march in formation. The sentence also runs on across the line endings ("so / prosaic", "grey / and grim"), so it spills over its own boundaries. Against that grayness the speaker offers "a magical buffet, / a wondrous world where platters overflow". The vocabulary swells with the claim, from "magical" to "wondrous" to "overflow".
The sestet's pattern, *cdcdcd*, has a small trick in it. "Buffet" only rhymes with "grey" and "pay" if it is pronounced the French way, with a silent *t*. The poem asks us to say the word with a flourish of restaurant grandeur, which suits its elevated mood.
Then comes the last line: "as long as you've a credit card to pay." The speaker has said "I" all the way through, and now suddenly says "you", as if stepping back from the trolley to address the reader. The rhyme word "pay" lands like a till receipt. The wonderland is conditional, and the condition is money. The choice of a *credit* card, rather than cash, suggests spending that is not quite covered, though the poem doesn't push the point. It is hard to say whether the ending is a wry shrug or a pointed comment on consumer culture, and the poem seems content to leave it open.
What makes the poem worth reading is how neatly form and joke work together. The sonnet's machinery of rhyme, turn and closing couplet-like punch gives a trip to the shops the shape of an argument, and the last line then reveals how thin the fantasy is. In fourteen lines it manages to celebrate abundance and to question it.