within me, music seemed to be; Something (1) These two lines from Christina Rossetti's An Old-World Thicket seem to touch on something peculiar to her work, something roundabout, snatching, teasing. There's it's music; it's Without within; music, yet musical. The lines disclose as much as they withold, so that reading them is bit like watching magician's trick: now you see it (the white rabbit, music), now you don't. We're sure where music is, or whether it is music at all. By time we've finished, our minds are empty--empty, at least, of any object to be named or known. But our ears are full. Something, whatever it is, suggests hearing, and makes us listen. Although grammar scrambles thing (it is not and yet), repetition insists on it: music, most musical. am reminded of Marianne Moore's comment about in general: there are things that are important beyond all fiddle, (2) where fiddle puns on three different senses: cheat, fidgetting, and of Without, within me, music seemed to be; / Something musical. Such verbal constructions are common in Rossetti. In Sonnet Six from Later Life, for instance, she writes: this, nor that; certainly (l. 2), where somewhat, whatever it is, hovers in distinctly uncertain twilight between this and that. In Somewhere or Other, verbal game of be or far, be far or near (ll. 5, 9), bats its desired object elusively between contrary perspectives. Such playing fast and loose, missing poetic object by an inch or mile, is one of poet's favorite tactics. Christina Rossetti is master magician, as well as, of course, master musician. Although essay is focused on some sonnets of Rossettis, sonnet form as such is its object. Instead of looking at technical formalities of sonnet, its lines, rhyme scheme, and meter, want to try listening, to way sonnet becomes shape in ear, sound-work or rhythm. value seeing eye already, Robert Frost once pointed out: Time we said something about ear. (3) The hearing ear nicely emphasizes what it might like: tautological and self-echoing. Gerard Manley Hopkins once expostulated of his own poetry: but take breath and read it with (34) Not only reader, writer too, depends on ears. As Ezra Pound put it: the true economy lies in making tune first. We all of us compose verse to some sort of tune. (5) When Hall Caine reported to Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Watts-Dunton had proposed strict criteria of rhyme and meter in his choice of poems for Sonnets of Three Centuries, Rossetti answered briskly: I would be too anxious were you about anything in choice of sonnets except brains and music. (6) Again, So what do we mean by music in poetry, and is it interpretable? Too often music has seemed merely singable extra to content and thought, pleasing sonorousness, added like gloss. Yet, wherever we look, we find poets themselves invoking as origin of what they do. Not only does the music of poetry exist apart from as T. S. Eliot asserts, a poem, or passage of poem, may tend to realize itself first as particular rhythm ... and that rhythm may bring to birth idea and image. (7) Music may come first and create meaning. There is nice definition in James Longenbach's The Resistance to Poetry (2004), which suggests how we might shift traditionally oppositional terms of music and meaning, form and content. He writes that we should attend to the of thinking in poetry--not of finished thought. (8) The sound of thinking: it's an interesting phrase. For start it leaves out pronouns. …