Despite all his successes and opportunities in Cape Town, Chisholm must still have felt keenly the draw of home, and he appears to have shown interest in the Chair of Music at Queen's University, Belfast, in 1953, though whether he actually applied is not clear. He was also not uncritical of his own productions, though confident enough to compare his work with British equivalents:

The quantity, in this case, consisted of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, Menotti's The Telephone and The Medium, Wolf-Ferrari’s Susanna's Secret and Chisholm's Dark Sonnet. In setting up these tours in Africa (of which this was but one of several), Chisholm was going far beyond the call of duty. One could almost say that he was on a mission to African audiences on behalf of the operas themselves, and also on behalf of his singers and musicians, who were thereby gaining tremendous work experience. He too was gaining in experience as a composer of operas and, harking back, perhaps, to his youthful ploys in cinema ‘noir’ (see Chapter 1), planned a triptych of his own operas to be entitled Murder in Three Keys. The candidates for inclusion were Dark Sonnet, Sweeney Agonistes (which became Black Roses), Simoon, and The Pardoner's Tale. This latter was one of three operas based on Chaucer, in the original Middle English (see Chapter 9).

Dark Sonnet is a remarkable piece. With one of the most unrelenting and grim scenarios of any opera, it succeeded in becoming one of Chisholm's most successful compositions. A woman getting ready for work taunts her off-stage unfaithful husband until, at the very end of the opera, he commits suicide. The soprano, who has to carry the entire vocal and dramatic burden, has to be exceptional and, in Noreen Berry, Chisholm had such a singer and actress. Chisholm's music is intense and employs an idiom which is as dissonant as anything he produced.