Summary
The speaker announces that she thinks of "thee," addressing an unidentified listener. She compares her thoughts to vines, and the addressee to a tree, saying that vines surround a tree trunk in much the same way that her thoughts about the lover surround and conceal his actual self. But the speaker goes on to assure her addressee that she prefers his presence to her imagination. She urges him to shake off the limitations of her thoughts like a tree shaking off vines.
Analysis
Elizabeth Barrett Browning works carefully within the confines of the sonnet form here, shaping the turns of her narrative around the requirements of the sonnet's structure. This particular poem is an Italian sonnet, which consists of an octave (or eight-line stanza) followed by a sestet (or six-line stanza). The rhyme scheme changes between these two stanzas, with the octave consisting of an ABBA ABBA pattern and the sestet instead consisting of a CDCDCD pattern. This means that a major shift in content, tone, or perspective usually takes place between the octave and the sestet—but in this poem, Browning also places an important shift in the middle of the octave, just when the ABBA pattern is about to repeat itself. Thus the Italian sonnet becomes an ideal vehicle for describing the intricacies, contradictions, and waverings that characterize the speaker's thoughts. This is, after all, a poem about a speaker's process of equivocation.
In line one, the speaker announces unabashedly and with a sharp, exclamatory statement that she thinks about the addressee. She then launches into an extended metaphor, which only serves to underscore and make more vivid what she has just revealed by giving her abstract statement a concrete physical form. In this extended metaphor, the speaker's thoughts wind around the addressee like vines wrapping around a tree trunk. This image tells us that, through thinking of her lover, the speaker is able to create a type of proximity to them, so that at least her thoughts are near her loved one even if the two individuals are physically separated. However, her language takes on a slightly sinister edge by line four. She refers to the vines as "straggling," hinting that they are chaotic and somewhat uncontrolled. She also describes them hiding the tree itself, hinting that her thoughts can have a suffocating effect on the person she loves. This is a paradoxical, intriguing notion: that the person who inspires the speaker's imagination can be eclipsed by that very same imagination.
All of this occurs within the poem's first four lines and its first repetition of the ABBA rhyming pattern. With the second repetition in lines 5-8, Browning changes course, signaling that she is moving in a different direction with the word "yet." In this second segment of the poem, the speaker seems to realize that there are alarming aspects to the way that she thinks about her lover. She moves quickly to reassure him, and these lines of the poem reveal a new level of intimacy and emotional intensity between the two individuals. The speaker addresses the lover solely in the second person, calling him "my palm tree" rather than describing the tree in the third person. She also urges him to act with an imperative sentence structure, again reinforcing the impression of informal closeness between the two. An outpouring of affection occurs in these lines, with the speaker assuring her listener that she prefers the reality of him to any imagined version.
