Poetry Magazine | Guildford Poets Press

A Poem by Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you;
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.

SCOUTING FOR POETS
(World is suddener than we fancy it - Louis Macniece, Snow) by Jeffery Wheatley, reproduced from Weyfarers 104.

In his military days, before writing Scouting for Boys, Robert Baden-Powell escaped from Matabele (now Zimbabwean) natives by running over large stones, putting only one foot on each and using a foot and eye coordination beyond local ability, which he attributed to his skill at country dancing. There are poems that work in this way, moving quickly from image to image, seeing the next before leaving the last so that they share associations common to each and sweep the thought chain along without a pause.
     William Empson wrote poems that skip along the shared borders of life, science and metaphysics so that his Camping Out could begin with the practicalities:
And now she cleans her teeth into the lake:
and within a few lines find that:
Soap tension the star pattern magnifies.
and conclude that
Who moves so among stars their frame unties;
See where they blur, and die, and are outsoared.
     Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity remains a classic analysis of the poetry of associations.  
     The late Patrick (Paddy) Stevens, a brave and distinguished soldier and a Surrey poet, used to say that words strike sparks off one another. Sparks formed by associated ideas provide the links, which may be logical, punning or based on the similarity of words. They allow swift movement from idea to idea and increase the intensity of the work. A few lines from his Declaration of Independence provide an example. Pivotal words have been emboldened by me, not by him:
So dare I fumble with your soul
and offer tentative regrets?
Am I an accident of time
that will catch you on a claw
or set the world upon a rack
and coldly take the pleasures I desire?
Other lines from the same poem show the turbulence of his vision:
What is the mystery of the singing bird?
. . .
I've spread my feathers on the football field, deployed my argument in debate:
the ragged ends of my desires
are groping for a touch,
not yet connected to the national system.
Can I devise a model to explore
the massive range of my emotions
and the tumbling pictures in my brain?
I look into your eyes to find
the ghosts of ancient warriors
who ravished on a whim.

Quickness of movement is not the same as obscurity. Nor does clear mean prosey. Poems in which the links are personal, rather than intuitive, may be inaccessible to the reader. The cloud of associations may do their work subconsciously, so that they cause the hairs on the back of your neck to rise before you understand why. The effect can be heightened if the poem has a good plot, for example one in which an idea introduced casually at the beginning suddenly returns at the end, given a new and deeper meaning by what has passed between.   
       Louis MacNiece's fine poem, Snow, moves in only twelve lines from the sight of a bowl of roses against a window with snow beyond it through the unexpected nature of everyday things to an almost mystical conclusion that
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses
The conclusion itself is rich in associations, recalling the 17th century metaphysical poet George Herbert's hymn/poem The Elixir:
     A man that looks on glass
     On it may stay his eye
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass
     And then the Heaven espy.
Herbert was connected with a religious community at Little Gidding (the title and subject of Eliot's fourth Quartet, a poem in which snow and roses are key images). And early on in Eliot's poem we have:
. . . Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer . . .
Which of itself provides a little surprise, because Eliot suggests springtime whereas much of MacNiece's imagery seem to imply winter, and it recalls the MacNiece line that:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

    The Australian poet Les Murray shows the same facility with associations in many of his poems. There is a series of disconcerting prospects in The Engineer Formerly Known as Strangelove, where he describes the process:
The Cold War is a Dämmerung long since of dead Götter
But I am still in cutting edge high tech.
In a think-tank up to my neck
I rotate, projecting scenarios.

Let it not be thought that I am suggesting that all good poems are built in this way, not least because I have made no mention of other virtues. There are poems written from the heart which reach the reader through their simplicity, directness, good diction and absence of false sentiment but which make little or no use of associative devices. Approaches to form vary greatly but good poems have common features. Somewhere in his writings Robert Graves likened a finished poem to a round tower, from which no stone can be added and none taken away. This is a good test.

References
William Empson, 1955. Collected Poems, Chatto and Windus.
William Empson, 1961. Seven Types of Ambiguity, Peregrine Books.
T. S. Eliot, 1959. Four Quartets, Faber and Faber. George Herbert, 1889 edition of poems with Walton's Life, Walter Scott, London.
Louis MacNiece, 1949. Collected Poems 1925-1948, Faber and Faber. Les Murray, 2002. Poems the Size of Photographs, Carcanet.
Patrick Stevens, 1976. Declaration of Independence, Guildford Poets Press.