“I Think of Thee” is an Italian sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which first appeared in her 1850 collection Sonnets from the Portuguese. In the work, a speaker describes her desire to imagine and fantasize about a lover, who is addressed in the second person, and her conflicting concern that imagined ideals will overshadow the experience of romantic togetherness. To convey these conflicts, Browning uses an extended metaphor in which the speaker's thoughts are described as vines enveloping a tree, which represents the lover.
Like most Italian sonnets, the poem consists of an octave with an ABBA ABBA rhyme scheme followed by a sestet with a CDCDCD rhyme scheme. It is written in iambic pentameter, although Browning occasionally diverges from the established meter. Browning also makes heavy use of caesura and alliteration to convey a romantic, affectionate, but pensive and conflicted tone.
This work, like the other sonnets in Sonnets from the Portuguese, is autobiographical and was originally addressed to the poet's husband Robert Browning. However, its characters and setting are not explicitly identified, and its focus is on the internal life of its speaker.
