Topic Summaries

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GCSE > English Literature > AQA > GCSE AQA English Literature Love and Relationships Poetry Topic Summaries > ‘Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning > Summary
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‘Climbing My Grandfather’ by Andrew Waterhouse

‘Eden Rock’ by Charles Causley

‘The Farmer’s Bride’ by Charlotte Mew

‘Follower’ by Seamus Heaney

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‘Mother, any distance’ by Simon Armitage

‘Neutral Tones’ by Thomas Hardy

‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Robert Browning

‘Singh Song!’ by Daljit Nagra

‘Sonnet 29 – ‘I think of thee!’’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

‘Walking Away’ by Cecil Day-Lewis

‘When We Two Parted’ by Lord Byron

‘Winter Swans’ by Owen Sheers

Key ideas to compare between poems

‘Sonnet 29’ explores the speaker’s intense emotional and physical longing for her beloved. The poem opens with the speaker confessing that her thoughts “twine and bud” around him like wild vines enveloping a tree. This extended metaphor conveys both the beauty and suffocation of obsessive love. The image suggests that her inner world is overgrown with desire, and that her thoughts threaten to obscure the true presence of her beloved.

At the volta (line 9), the speaker’s tone shifts from contemplation to a plea for physical presence. She implores him to “renew thy presence” and “burst” through the mental and emotional entanglements that confine him in her imagination.

This act of breaking free from thought into reality is portrayed as cathartic and sensual. The speaker desires not just emotional closeness but physical proximity – not just to think of him from afar, but to be “too near” to him to even contemplate him as a separate entity.

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