ABSTRACT
This chapter is about a modern form developed in the Italian states and exported. The making of the sonnet leads to different ways of seeing despite the common tradition from Italian, French and English for this poetic form. There are many fine sonnets from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that could add to our understanding of making and seeing in the sonnet. Lyrics, like sonnets, seem meant to be private addresses of lovers or others but they are overheard and have an audience. This sonnet is a performance, a lyric that has theatricality to it, a private world overheard and made public. The sonnet, like some other lyrics, can be oxymoronic in its private-public performance. Christina Rossetti plays on the theme of love in a sonnet, thus making images of love in an extended form but also alluding to the tradition of the sonnet form itself. The sonnet is an extended representation or picture of a landscape among the orchards.
