Anyone who has typed "thinking of you" in a card or a text knows how little the phrase actually carries. John B. Colwell builds a poem around that gap. Instead of simply declaring affection, he stops to interrogate the words themselves: what, exactly, happens in the mind when we say them? The poem is an attempt to unpack a cliché, and its central discovery is that the person we think of is never a single image but a whole texture of sensations, habits, and feelings that no phrase can hold.
The first stanza opens with a question, and questions drive the whole poem. Colwell offers a list of candidates for what the phrase "conjures": a face, shining eyes, a walk, a smile, "your garment of blue." These are all surface details, the kind a stranger could notice. The speaker seems dissatisfied with them, ending on the almost impatient "Oh, what is the answer, I say?" The second stanza tries again with memories instead of looks: shared reading, the music of a voice, roses matched to a cheek. Here the beloved is moving from appearance toward experience, though the images remain fairly conventional, and the roses-and-cheeks comparison is the sort of thing a reader will recognize from a long tradition of love verse.
The real turn comes in the final stanza, where the speaker confesses, "the you that I know / I can never, no never explain." The repeated "never" is the poem's most honest moment, and the list that follows changes character. Now we get a laugh, a touch, kindness, sympathy, "deep understanding, come weal or come woe." Notice that almost nothing here is visual. The beloved has become a set of qualities and gestures: what she does for him and how she makes him feel. Colwell is quietly arguing that real closeness lies less in remembered looks than in being understood.
The construction supports this slow deepening. Each stanza begins by quoting the title phrase, so "I am thinking of you" returns like a refrain, and the speaker examines it from a different angle each time. The closing line, "the 'you' of my song and refrain," ties the poem back to this device, as if the repeated phrase has become the song's own chorus. The rhyme scheme is generous, even indulgent. The first stanza piles up five lines on the same sound ("you," "true," "do," "blue"), and the final stanza stretches this further, with its fourth and fifth lines continuing the rhyme in a rush of "show," "glow," "woe," "bestow." This heaping-up mimics the way feelings crowd in when we try to name someone we love; the lines can't stop adding things.
The rhythm is bouncy and lilting, built on a loose, galloping pattern in which stresses fall on every third beat or so, with shorter indented lines that act almost like a sigh at the end of each stanza. That musical lightness suits the speaker's tone, which is affectionate and a little wistful rather than anguished. The slightly old-fashioned diction, such as "'tis," "I pray," "weal or woe," and "mem'ry," gives the poem a gentle, courtly flavor, though it also makes some lines feel more conventional than they might otherwise.
What makes the poem worth attention is less its originality of imagery than its self-awareness. Many love poems simply assert feeling; this one watches itself failing to capture it and treats that failure as the point. The phrase "thinking of you" is called "a joy as complete / As the star lighted heavens at night," a comparison that suggests not a single bright object but a whole sky, vast and made of many points. That image quietly answers the poem's own question. The beloved cannot be reduced to one memory because she is more like a field of lights.
For a student reader, the lesson is a useful one about language: the simplest sentences often hide the most, and a poet's job can be to slow down and open them up.