Peripeteia

A modest disguise
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 29, I think of thee, is a poem of intense and passionate yearning for an absent lover. If you’ve been in love and experienced how you can’t seem to stop thinking about that person when they are not with you, so that your thoughts seem out-of-control and threaten to overwhelm you, then you will recognise what the poet expresses in this poem. She wrote it as a private expression of her love for the poet Robert Browning, with whom she had begun a secret courtship. The couple later married, but her father disowned her as he did not approve of her choice. It was only after they were married that Elizabeth mentioned she had written a series of sonnets about her husband while they were courting. When he read them, he was convinced they were the best sonnets written in English since Shakespeare’s and encouraged her to publish. However, they were so personal and revealing, having never been intended for anyone other than Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself, that they were published under the title Sonnets from the Portuguese, in an attempt to pretend they were obscure translations of another poet, rather than intimate expressions of her own private emotions. This accounts for the intensely personal tone of Sonnet 29; when we write about this poem, we can confidently talk about the poet’s own feelings rather than those of a dramatized speaker, although inevitably there is always some act of dramatization to any poem, regardless of how closely and accurately the poet wants to express their own personality in their work.

A technical challenge
To fully appreciate Barrett Browning’s art and achievement in this poem, we first need to understand something of the poetic form in which she chose to compose it - the sonnet. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, poets have experimented greatly with sonnets, but traditionally they tend to be love poems and have a very strict poetic structure that places a number of rules or limitations on the poet, making sonnets a challenge to write. Sonnets must have fourteen lines and tend to be written in iambic pentameter, lines of ten syllables that alternate between an unstressed and a stressed syllable, as in the opening line of Sonnet 29 where Barrett Browning writes ‘I think of thee! - my thoughts do twine and bud’. Sonnets also tend to follow a distinctive rhyming pattern. There are different variations of sonnets depending on how the ideas are arranged and what the rhyme scheme is, but the most common types are the Petrarchan (also known as Italian) sonnet, the Spenserian and the Shakespearean sonnet. Sonnet 29 is written as a Petrarchan sonnet, probably the most challenging form for writers in English due to the more limited number of rhymes. Traditionally Petrarchan sonnets are divided into an octave of eight lines (rhyming abbaabba) that presents a problem, followed by a sestet of six lines, which presents the solution. The rhyme scheme for the sestet can be more flexible but tends to follow cdecde or cdcdcd. The transition from the octave to the sestet where the poem shifts from a problem to a solution occurs between the eighth and ninth lines and is known as a volta, which means ‘turn’ in Italian. Barret Browning was an accomplished sonnet writer and most of her sonnets follow the rules impeccably, but what makes this poem remarkable is the way in which she deliberately breaks some of the rules of the sonnet to create particular effects and communicate specific meanings that powerfully reveal the intense emotions she was feeling.

An example of this rule-breaking is immediately obvious in Barret Browning’s poetic form, where she entwines the octave and sestet through her rhyme scheme, abbaabba cbcbcb, with the b rhyme from the octave weaving its way into the sestet. In fact, it’s even more complex than that due to the poem’s sentence structures as the sestet actually comprises two tercets, one rhymed cbc, then another rhymed bcb. This means she has chosen an envelope rhyme, a rhyme scheme that creates backward momentum and circularity, where the rhyme sounds ‘insphere’ each other, delivering a sonic entanglement that chimes perfectly with the encircling ‘wild vines’ Barret Browning describes suffocating the symbolic ‘strong tree of the poem.

My thoughts do twine and bud
Although the poem was originally only intended for Elizabeth herself, she starts by addressing her future husband, Robert Browning, when she writes ‘I think of thee!’ The exclamation mark emphasises the excitement he makes her feel, as do the short, simple, monosyllabic words that create the impression that nothing else is important to her. The archaic pronoun ‘thee’ also generates a much more intimate tone than using ‘you’ might and appears seven times in the poem, demonstrating just how important and all-encompassing her future husband was to her. ‘Thee’ also suggests, particularly as Barrett Browning was a devout Christian, the religious language of the King James Bible, where it appears 2,738 times, elevating her love for Robert Browning almost into the spiritual sphere of devotional love for God.

However, no sooner does the poet begin to think of her love than her thoughts are interrupted by the dash in line one, which creates a pause in the rhythm, known as a caesura. The caesura again emphasises the importance of ‘thee’ by forcing us to dwell on this word, but it also suggests the poet is not quite in control of her thoughts, as if they are taking on a life and direction of their own. This leads into the next part of the poem where Barrett Browning introduces the poem’s central image: ‘my thoughts do twine and bud/ About thee, as wild vines, about a tree’. Here, she uses a simile to compare her thoughts about Robert to a vine that wraps itself around the trunk of a tree as it climbs up and smothers the tree’s bark. She draws once again on Biblical language, this time from Song of Songs in The Old Testament, where the female speaker in the book also compares her love to a palm tree and says ‘thy stature is like to a palm tree…I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine’. Song of Songs is a celebration of sexual love and there is an equally charged, erotic dimension to Barrett Browning’s poem, the verb ‘twine’ suggestive of the poet wrapping herself around her lover, the adjective ‘wild’ evocative of an uncontrolled release of passion and desire, and the image of the tree a barely disguised phallic symbol. Such details might make a prudish reader blush even today; imagine, then, how shocking the poem’s sentiments might have been to the average Victorian reader, particularly so as the writer of this sensual, erotic material is, of course, a lady.

However, while she delights in her love, the problem for the poet is that her thoughts and emotions seem to be growing out-of-control, something she cleverly evokes through enjambment. Her thoughts in line one, for example, spill over into line two. The caesuras after ‘thee’ and ‘vines’ in line two also suggest the sudden growth of ideas or a change of direction, as if her thoughts are wrapping themselves around the poem like the vines around the tree. Irrepressible growth is also evoked through the way the simile comparing her thoughts to a vine and the man she loves to a tree evolves into an extended metaphor - also known as a conceit - that weaves itself throughout the whole poem. The central problem that the octave presents is that the poet’s overpowering thoughts for this man are clouding and obscuring the man himself, so that she can no longer see him clearly. He becomes more and more submerged under her thoughts, in the same way a vine might grow up and around a tree, hiding its bark and true form. As she says in the next two lines, ‘and soon there’s nought to see/ Except the straggling green which hides the wood’. Here, the verb ‘straggling’ gives a strong sense of the way her thoughts have become unkempt and overgrown. We can also almost hear the word ‘strangling’, which is what a vine eventually does to a tree if left unchecked, implying that her thoughts risk completing destroying the true image of the man himself. But as she determines in line six, ‘I will not have my thoughts instead of thee’. For the solution to her problem, we now need to turn to the sonnet’s sestet.