Grade 9 Notes: Sonnet 29 – 'I think of thee!'

What is this exam testing?

Sonnet 29 – 'I think of thee!' is examined on one course Incandio supports: AQA GCSE English Literature (8702), as one of the fifteen poems in the Love and Relationships cluster on Paper 2. You meet it in one of two ways — printed on the paper as the named poem, or remembered as the poem you choose to set beside a different named poem. Both routes reward the same three things: an argument of your own (AO1), close attention to how the poem's language, form and structure make that argument (AO2), and context that genuinely changes how a line reads (AO3 — on this course AO3 means context, not comparison). For Sonnet 29 that means a view about what the poem does with thought and presence, a handful of exact phrases, and one or two pieces of context — the sonnet tradition, the courtship in which the sequence was written, Victorian expectations of women — welded to a line.

AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Paper 2, Section B: Poetry (Love and Relationships)

Section B asks one comparative question on the cluster. One poem is named and printed; you choose a second from the same cluster and write about it from memory. There is no separate mark for comparing: comparison is the task itself, credited through the quality of your argument and your analysis. Accuracy of spelling and grammar (AO4) is not credited on this question, though clear writing still carries the argument. On Pearson Edexcel International GCSE the same AO codes mean different things; never carry them across.

AO1 · A personal, critical response, supported by references

What the examiner wants: An argument about what the poem does with love, not a paraphrase of its metaphor. The strongest answers ask why the speaker turns against her own thoughts, and what kind of love the ending celebrates.

Scoring highly: Range across the octave and the sestet: the twining, budding thoughts; the hidden tree; the turn to command; the boughs and trunk; the shattered greenery; the paradox of the final line. Keep a second poem in every paragraph.

Top band vs the band below: Top answers treat the metaphor as an argument: saying her thoughts are like vines is an observation; arguing that the poem shows imagination as something that can replace the beloved with an image of him, and that the speaker chooses the real man over her own idea of him, is a concept.

The common mistake: Writing that the poem ‘compares the man to a tree’ and stopping, without noticing that the metaphor is mainly about the speaker's own thoughts and what they do to him.

In your essay: Open with a comparative thesis that names both poems and the difference that matters, then build three or four paragraphs that each hold both poems, and finish on what the pairing shows that neither poem shows alone.

AO2 · Language, form and structure, with subject terminology

What the examiner wants: Analysis of Barrett Browning's methods: the extended metaphor of vine and tree; the Petrarchan sonnet's octave and sestet; the turn from reflection to command; imperative verbs; exclamation and dashes; the repeated rhyme on ‘thee’ in the sestet; the closing paradox.

Scoring highly: Read form as meaning: the octave describes the thoughts that smother; the sestet commands them to be shattered; and the closing paradox resolves the problem the form has posed.

Top band vs the band below: The best answers notice the sound of the sestet: three of its line-endings rhyme on ‘thee’, so the beloved's name, in its intimate form, closes the poem over and over — the presence she asks for is enacted in the rhyme.

The common mistake: Naming ‘Petrarchan sonnet’ without saying what the structure does — where the turn falls and what changes there.

In your essay: In each paragraph name the method, pin down the words or moment doing the work, say what it does to a reader, then say what the partner poem does differently. Make at least one point about form or structure.

AO3 · Context — the relationship between the poem and the world it comes from

What the examiner wants: How the poem's world shapes it: the sonnet tradition, in which male poets usually addressed silent, idealised women; the sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850 and written during the poet's courtship with Robert Browning; and Victorian expectations of women's modesty and passivity in love.

Scoring highly: One clause at a time: in a tradition where the poet was usually a man praising a silent woman, a woman's voice that commands her beloved to ‘Renew thy presence’ turns the form around.

Top band vs the band below: Context that generates a reading: because the sonnet tradition is built on distance — a lover who longs for someone unattainable — a sonnet that ends with the speaker ‘too near’ to think rewrites what the form is for.

The common mistake: Paragraphs about the Brownings' elopement that never touch a line of the poem.

In your essay: Two or three contextual clauses across the essay, each welded to a moment in a poem and each changing what that moment means. Never a paragraph of background on its own.

Avoid. Assuming the tree is negative because it is hidden. The tree is the beloved — strong, worth seeing. It is the speaker's thoughts that are the problem, and she says so.

Examiner insight. A strong comparative opening names a method: ‘Both Barrett Browning and Shelley use the natural world to express longing, but Shelley's nature is evidence in an argument for a first kiss, while Barrett Browning's vines are a metaphor for thoughts she wants torn away so that a love already returned can become presence.’

If you choose this as your partner poem, carry its shape: fourteen lines; an octave about thoughts that twine and hide; a turn to command; a sestet in which the tree shakes off the vines; a paradox to finish.

The speaker and the figures

The themes

Context

Context: the sonnet tradition and the courtship

The sonnet tradition. The sonnet came into English from Italian poetry, especially the sonnets of Petrarch, which express a male lover's longing for an idealised, distant woman. For centuries the form carried that pattern: the man speaks and longs; the woman is silent and unattainable. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence of forty-four sonnets published in 1850, takes over the form for a woman's voice.

The courtship. The sequence was written during her courtship with the poet Robert Browning. They first came to know each other through letters and married in 1846. Victorian expectations held that women should be modest and passive in love; a woman openly declaring desire, and commanding her beloved, challenged those expectations. That context sharpens the poem's confident voice and its preference for presence over imagined love.

Use context in single clauses tied to lines: ‘Renew thy presence’ against the tradition of the silent beloved; ‘I will not have my thoughts instead of thee’ against a courtship that had to live in letters and thoughts before it could become presence.

Form, voice and comparison

Form: the Petrarchan sonnet

Fourteen lines in the Petrarchan pattern: an octave rhyming ABBAABBA (bud, tree, see, wood; understood, thee, instantly, should) and a sestet rhyming CDCDCD (bare, insphere thee, everywhere, hear thee, air, near thee). The form usually poses a problem in the octave and answers it in the sestet.

The Petrarchan sonnet was invented for love poetry, traditionally spoken by a man longing for an unattainable woman. Barrett Browning uses the form for a woman's voice and ends not in longing but in closeness.

Structure: problem, turn, resolution

The octave states the problem: her thoughts grow over him and hide him. The turn comes as she refuses — she will not have thoughts instead of him — and commands him to renew his presence. The sestet imagines the vines shattering and ends in the joy of nearness.

The poem's last line answers its first. It opens ‘I think of thee!’ and closes ‘I do not think of thee’. The reversal is the poem's argument in miniature: thought has given way to presence.

The turn comes earlier than usual. A Petrarchan sonnet traditionally changes direction at line nine, but here the speaker begins to resist her thoughts at line five, with ‘Yet’, and gives her first command at line eight. The early turn suggests impatience: she cannot wait for the form's usual moment to change course. Pointing out where the turn falls, and what it suggests, is precise structural analysis.

Language: imperatives, exclamations and the rhyme on thee

The speaker uses imperatives — renew, rustle, set, let, drop — that make her voice commanding. Exclamation marks and dashes add urgency and break up the controlled sonnet lines. In the sestet, three lines end on ‘thee’, so the beloved's pronoun closes the poem again and again, as if the speaker's attention is now wholly fixed on him.

The verbs of the vines are verbs of growth — twine, bud, put out — and then of destruction — drop, burst, shattered. The change in verbs maps the change in the speaker's attitude to her own thoughts.

Symbols: vine, tree, shadow and air

The vine is the speaker's thoughts: loving, clinging, multiplying — and smothering. The tree, and especially the palm-tree, is the beloved: strong, upright, real. The greenery that ‘insphere[s]’ the tree is imagination grown into a prison. The shadow and the new air of the closing lines are the beloved's presence: to stand in his shadow is to be near him, and the air there is fresh, as if his presence renews life itself.

Following the symbols through the poem gives a structural argument: the octave is dominated by the vine, the sestet by the tree and then by the shadow and air of presence. The poem moves from the speaker's mind to the beloved's reality.

Key words and what they carry

twine: To wind closely around something. Her thoughts twine around him, closely and possessively.

straggling: Growing untidily and spreading out. The vines have become a shapeless mass.

insphere: To enclose all round, as in a sphere. The greenery encloses the tree completely.

renew: To restore or bring back. His presence must be restored after being hidden by her thoughts.

Precise meanings help analysis. ‘Straggling’ makes the thoughts sound untidy and uncontrolled; ‘insphere’ makes them sound like a prison around him. The speaker's language judges her own imagination.

Comparison: the strongest partners

Love's Philosophy (Shelley) is the classic pairing: both use nature to express longing. Shelley's nature is evidence for a kiss not yet given; Barrett Browning's is a metaphor for thoughts that must be cleared so a returned love can become presence.

Porphyria's Lover (Browning) offers a sharp contrast: a man who wants to freeze his beloved as a fixed image, against a woman who rejects her image of the beloved and wants the living man.

Winter Swans (Sheers) and Letters from Yorkshire (Dooley) both deal with closeness and distance in a relationship, and let an essay compare how presence is imagined or achieved.

Grade 9 insight. Compare methods: the sonnet's turn; extended metaphor; imperatives against Shelley's rhetorical questions.

Readings to weigh

Another reading. A celebratory reading: the poem rejoices in a love so close that thought is unnecessary.

Another reading. A self-critical reading: the speaker recognises that her imagination has distorted love, and chooses reality.

Another reading. A gendered reading: a woman takes over a male form and makes the beloved answer to her command.

Shock the examiner: what most answers miss

Most answers say the speaker loves the beloved so much that she thinks of him all the time. The poem says the opposite is the problem: her thoughts hide him. The speaker criticises her own imagination.

The first line and the last line contradict each other. ‘I think of thee!’ becomes ‘I do not think of thee’. The whole sonnet is the journey between them.

Three lines of the sestet end on ‘thee’. The beloved's pronoun closes the poem over and over, so the presence she asks for is enacted in the rhyme.

The sonnet tradition gave the voice to men and silence to women. Here a woman speaks, commands, and expects to be answered. The form itself is part of the argument.

The vines are not evil — they grow from love. That is what makes the poem subtle: love itself, in the form of thought, can get in the way of love.

Thesis statements

• Barrett Browning presents imagination as a danger to love as well as a sign of it: the speaker's thoughts grow like wild vines until they hide the man they cling to.
• Sonnet 29 values presence over thought, moving from ‘I think of thee!’ to ‘I do not think of thee’ as nearness replaces imagining.
• The poem's imperatives give a woman a commanding voice in a form traditionally used by men to address silent women.
• The Petrarchan structure turns the poem's problem — thoughts that smother — into a command and then a resolution.
• The closing paradox presents love at its fullest as something too close to be thought about.

Essay plans

Compare the ways poets show longing in Sonnet 29 and one other poem from Love and Relationships.

Thesis: Both Barrett Browning and Shelley turn to nature to express longing, but Shelley's speaker uses it as evidence for a love not yet given and ends with an unanswered question, while Barrett Browning's uses it as a metaphor for thoughts she wants torn away so that a returned love can become presence.

1. Nature as metaphor against nature as evidence.
2. Voice: commanding imperatives against persuasive questions.
3. Form: the sonnet's turn against two parallel stanzas.
4. Endings: a resolved paradox against an open question. Conclude on fulfilment and frustration.

Compare the ways poets show the desire to be close to someone.

Thesis: Barrett Browning's speaker wants the living man and rejects her image of him; Browning's speaker in Porphyria's Lover wants to fix his beloved as an image for ever — so the two poems present closeness as presence and as possession.

1. What each speaker wants: a real presence against a frozen moment.
2. Voice and power: a commanding woman against a controlling man.
3. Form: the sonnet's resolution against the monologue's regular pattern.
4. Endings: joyful paradox against God's silence. Conclude on presence and possession.

Carry on

• The Complete Guide to Sonnet 29 – 'I think of thee!' — the whole text, told properly, in 19 chapters.
• The anthology as one system: Grade 9 Notes — the themes that bind the sixteen, the strongest pairings, and how to choose the second poem in the comparative essay.
• Sonnet 29 – 'I think of thee!' key quotes — the whole quotation bank, analysed, by character and theme.
• Sonnet 29 – 'I think of thee!' · All set texts · The 4ET1 specification