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They fight the elements with elementsAnd by the order in the field discloseThe order regnant in the yeoman's brain.
Perhaps Freud's most pregnant statement was that “There is nothing arbitrary or undetermined in the psychic life.”1 The premise that all acts have motives even though some motives are not conscious leads to the conclusion that there must be an unconscious portion of our minds; and in his works Freud has amply demonstrated the unconscious motives behind errors of everyday life, dreams, and neurotic symptoms. Starting with the same premise 1 shall attempt to analyse the meaning and significance of a poem entitled To a Very Young War Widow, composed by Carolyn Wilson Link.2 Besides analysing the poem and its symbolic connotations I shall attempt in this paper to clarify the concepts and methodology involved in the analysis of such psychic phenomena as symbolism and parallelism.
Because psychic phenomena are extremely complex and involve patterns of events rather than single lines of cause and effect, it is necessary to analyse the interrelationships of the components of a psychic event as thoroughly as possible before comparing that event to others in establishing the causal laws involved. Accordingly this