Key Quote
“"I do not think of thee — I am too near thee."”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · Sonnet 29 – 'I think of thee!'
Focus: “too near”
The paradoxical final line reverses the entire poem — thinking requires distance, but the beloved is so present in the speaker's mind that thought becomes impossible. Closeness exceeds thought.
Technique 1 — EXTENDED NATURAL METAPHOR — VINE AND TREE
Barrett Browning compares her thoughts to a vine wrapping around the tree of her beloved: 'my thoughts do twine and bud / About thee, as wild vines, about a tree'. The vine is parasitic — it draws life from the tree, cannot exist independently, and gradually covers it completely. This imagery is both passionate and slightly unsettling: love here is not gentle companionship but consuming, overwhelming growth.
The speaker then demands the vine be destroyed: 'Renew thy presence; as a strong tree should, / Burst, shatter, drop away'. The real presence of the beloved is asked to rupture the thoughts that substitute for him. Barrett Browning creates a hierarchy: imagination is inferior to reality, thought inferior to physical presence. The botanical metaphor becomes almost violent — the tree must 'burst' and 'shatter' the vine, suggesting love's fulfilment requires a kind of beautiful destruction.
Key Words
RAD — PROGRESS
The poem enacts a progression from absence (thinking about the beloved) to presence ('I am too near thee'). The speaker moves from the frustration of separation — where thoughts are a poor substitute for the real person — to the overwhelming joy of proximity. The volta (turn) at line 9 marks the shift: instead of continuing to describe longing, the speaker demands the beloved's actual presence, representing an assertive, empowered approach to desire.
Key Words
Technique 2 — THE PETRARCHAN VOLTA — STRUCTURAL REVERSAL
Barrett Browning uses the Petrarchan sonnet's built-in volta (turn between octave and sestet) to dramatic effect. The octave describes the vine of thought covering the tree; the sestet demands its destruction. This structural reversal mirrors the poem's emotional argument: imagination gives way to reality, absence gives way to presence, passivity gives way to demand. The form perfectly serves the content.
The final line — 'I do not think of thee — I am too near thee' — creates a paradox: the entire poem has been about thinking of the beloved, yet it concludes by declaring thought impossible. The dash (caesura) creates a pause where the shift occurs: from intellectual longing to physical overwhelming. Barrett Browning suggests that genuine love transcends cognition — it is felt, not thought.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
BARRETT BROWNING & ROBERT BROWNING
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning conducted a secret courtship through letters, as Elizabeth's domineering father forbade his children to marry. The 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' were written during this courtship and published after their elopement to Italy. The sequence is remarkable for its expression of female desire at a time when women were expected to be passive recipients of love, not active desirers.
WOMEN & POETIC VOICE
For a Victorian woman to write openly about physical desire and longing was radical. Barrett Browning appropriates (takes and uses for her own purpose) the traditionally male Petrarchan sonnet form — a form used by men to praise and pursue women — and reverses it: here, the woman is the desiring subject, the man the desired object. This is a quiet revolution in poetic history.
Key Words
WOW — THE FEMALE SUBLIME — REWRITING THE PETRARCHAN TRADITION
Barrett Browning performs what feminist critic Dorothy Mermin calls a revolution within the sonnet tradition. For 500 years, from Petrarch onwards, the sonnet was a male form: a man writes about an idealised, silent, unattainable woman. Barrett Browning inverts this entirely: the woman writes, the woman desires, the woman demands. The beloved is not placed on a pedestal but asked to 'burst' through the speaker's thoughts — to be real, physical, present. This is what we might call the female sublime: an experience of overwhelming emotion that is not about terror and awe (as in the male Romantic sublime) but about desire so intense it exceeds thought. The final line — 'I am too near thee' — describes an experience where the beloved has become so present that the self dissolves into proximity. Barrett Browning creates a new poetic language for female experience: not the quiet, restrained voice expected of Victorian women, but a voice of passionate, intellectual, unapologetic yearning.
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