When I Think of Thee, Brother

Name: When I Think of Thee, Brother
Author: Thomas Gordon Hake

“When I Think of Thee, Brother” is a lyric of divided remembrance, in which the speaker tries to summon a beloved brother but finds every memory overtaken by the presence of another person. The poem is built on repeated acts of recollection: the speaker thinks of the brother’s face, eyes, voice, and smile, longing to restore him inwardly as he was in shared domestic life. Yet each attempt fails. A second image intrudes: another face bends near, another name sounds beneath the brother’s, darker eyes replace his blue ones, another voice enters the imagined home, and another gaze rises beside the brother’s remembered smile. The emotional tension lies in this involuntary substitution. The speaker insists on devotion to the brother, claiming the heart remains wholly his and that the dream is of him alone. But memory does not obey intention. Affection, grief, and perhaps romantic attachment become entangled, so that the brother’s image cannot appear without this “other” presence. The poem dramatizes not simple forgetfulness, but the painful instability of love and mourning: the mind seeks one lost figure and is answered by another. Its recurring structure gives the poem the quality of a lament. Each stanza begins with the desire to recall the brother and ends with the same defeat: the brother is displaced, accompanied, or shadowed. Hake’s emphasis is not narrative incident but inward conflict, the way memory blends persons together despite the speaker’s declared loyalty. The result is a restrained, melancholy meditation on bereavement, divided attachment, and the helplessness of the imagination before emotional association.

By Thomas Gordon Hake · First published 1866 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Elegy, Romantic Poetry · 249 words

First lines

I: When I think of thee, brother, / Is my heart not all thine? / Yet the face of another / Seems bending o'er mine. / I call thee by name, yet a name not thy own / Has whispered already its dear undertone.

II: When I think thine eyes greet me, / Their sweet flash of blue / Brings another's to meet me / Of somberer hue; / And ever before me they seem to remain, / Though my heart but repines to behold thee again.

III: When I list, and would hear thee / Once more in our home, / And thy voice appears near me, / Another's has come. / I dream of thee only, for thee only sigh, / Yet thy image forsakes me; another's is nigh.

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When I Think of Thee, Brother is listed on Textopian as a poem by Thomas Gordon Hake, dated 1866 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Thomas Gordon Hake
Date: 1866 CE
Language: English
Genres: Lyric Poetry, Elegy, Romantic Poetry, Victorian Poetry, Sentimental Poetry
Length: 249 words
Structure: 1 section, 4 paragraphs
Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)

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Genres

Lyric Poetry — The work is a short, first-person poem centered on inward feeling, memory, and emotional conflict rather than narrative action.
Elegy — The speaker mournfully recalls an absent brother through repeated longing, sighing, and images of vanished moments.
Romantic Poetry — The poem emphasizes intense private emotion, idealized memory, musical repetition, and the pressure of feeling over external event.
Victorian Poetry — Thomas Gordon Hake wrote in the Victorian period, and the poem reflects Victorian lyric conventions of sentiment, polished stanza form, and restrained emotional confession.