Think Of It Not Sweet One - Analysis

Consolation that Keeps Touching the Wound

The poem’s central move is persuasive and intimate: the speaker tries to guide a beloved through a small grief by reshaping it into something survivable, even sweet. From the opening command—THINK not of it—the speaker wants to control how emotion is handled: not denied completely, but managed, measured, and finally transformed. What’s striking is how quickly comfort becomes a kind of choreography, as if the speaker is saying: feel, but only in the way I can hold.

From Give it not a tear to Permission to Weep

The first stanzas push restraint. The beloved may Sigh but must bid it go, and the grief is urged to leave Any---anywhere, a phrase that sounds breezy but also desperate—as if the speaker doesn’t care where the feeling goes as long as it goes away. Yet the poem almost immediately contradicts itself. The beloved may Shed one drop, because it is gone, and the speaker justifies this quick dismissal with a fatalistic proverb: ’twas born to die. That line makes the loss sound natural and inevitable, but it also reveals a deeper fear: if everything is born to die, then any attachment is always already under threat.

The Turn: When Control Softens into Counting

A clear hinge comes with Still so pale? The speaker stops insisting on composure and instead grants full permission: then, dearest, weep. But even this permission arrives with supervision: I’ll count the tears. The tenderness is real—he stays present—but the counting suggests an urge to convert raw feeling into a ledger of meaning. The poem’s key tension lives here: grief is allowed, yet it must become useful, something that can be stored up and redeemed as a bliss in after years. The speaker comforts by promising future payoff, but that promise also implies that present pain isn’t allowed to simply be pain.

Grief as a Beautifying Force

The speaker’s persuasion intensifies by claiming that sorrow improves the beloved. After weeping, the beloved’s eyes are Brighter than a sunny rill, and her whispering melodies become tenderer still. These images aren’t just compliments; they make sadness productive, even aesthetic. Tears brighten, mourning refines music. It’s a seductive idea—emotion as polish—but it also risks turning the beloved’s suffering into an instrument for beauty, something the speaker can admire. The poem flirts with the thought that pain is acceptable because it enhances the beloved’s radiance.

A Sharp Question Hidden in the Kisses

If each tear will become a bliss later, what happens to the beloved’s right to protest now? The speaker’s language keeps trying to shorten the life of grief—it is gone, born to die—while also lingering over the beloved’s altered eyes and voice. The poem comforts, but it also subtly feeds on the scene of sadness, as if the speaker can’t help watching for what sorrow will produce.

The Final Bargain: Mourning, but Only A dirge of kisses

The ending admits what the opening resisted: all things mourn awhile at fleeting blisses. The speaker finally grants mourning as universal, not a failure of will. But the concession comes with a condition—E’en let us too!—and a replacement ritual: let the dirge be a dirge of kisses. The phrase is beautiful and uneasy at once. It offers closeness instead of isolation, but it also re-routes grief into romance, as though kissing can stand in for what’s been lost. The poem ends not by erasing sorrow, but by insisting it must be made intimate—held, sweetened, and sung through the body.