Over a year after setting the poem Bisearta to music, MacNeill wanted to return to song-writing, but could not find lyrics to suit his purposes.
So he tried to write a sonnet, and the result was the first of the poems listed below, some of which are intended to communicate directly enough to work as lyrics. After all, sonnet is from the Italian for little song.

The rhyme-scheme of a Shakespearian sonnet is ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG or ABBA-CDDC-EFFE-GG. To a large extent, the sonnets here also follow the pattern of three quatrains and a couplet, but with the less usual rhyme-scheme ABBA-BCCB-CDDC-DD. In some cases, instead of four rhyming lines there are two pairs of rhyming lines, those rhymes having assonance. Sometimes rhymes are mid-word; occasionally there are only half-rhymes instead of rhymes. Commonly a poem has a change of viewpoint, a refocusing, the point after which this begins being known as the turn. In a sonnet the turn is often after line eight or twelve; in these sonnets, not all turns & line-breaks happen where the rhyme-scheme might suggest.