This work is a setting of a trilogy of sonnets by Christina Rossetti which she calls The Thread Of Life. It is a choral work with piano accompaniment. The first sonnet is about silences, sounds, the self, the environment around us and the conflicts between them. The pervading melancholy is established by the fact that all things are distanced from us (aloofness) both physically and emotionally. The second sonnet contrasts the differences between the silence of the inner (self) and outer worlds e.g. music, and silences are "a music of an unlike fashioning". The third sonnet confirms that far from being a prison, silence can be a sanctuary and comfort, and emerging from the silence of the mind, one has a voice to sing one's own song, poetry. The thought is not "as a death, which cannot choose but weep to have that which it fears to lose. " (Shakespeare), but it has no sting, nor the grave a victory.