The title of a poem often has a great deal to do with how we read it, and that's certainly the case with Cornford's "The Guitarist Tunes Up."
The title of this one gets us thinking about musicians, guitars, and the preparation that goes into playing an instrument. You can't just grab the thing and go to town, you've got to tune it up, and that takes some attention to detail.
With really short poems like this one, the title has an even greater influence because we never get very far away from it. The title doesn't really leave our sight. It just sits up there at the top of the page, usually in don't-forget-about-me bold. With longer poems, our eyes travel way down to the bottom of the page, or maybe we even turn the page and the title just kind of floats in our memory. Or we forget it entirely.
Because "The Guitarist Tunes Up" is super short, it's really easy for us to apply all those music-y ideas from the title to the lovers that show up when things take a more figurative turn in the body of the poem. That's how a poem about a guitar player tuning up turns into a poem about the pursuit of love in just eight lines. Pretty neat trick, right?