English Literature

A writer known most famously for his novel Lady Chatterleys Lover, D.H. Lawrence has written several poems filled with vivid imagery and allegory. D.H. Lawrences poem Piano is a three-quatrain lyric, in which he recounts a memory from his childhood. It is a short poem of twelve lines rhymed aabb. In the first quatrain, Lawrence describes listening to a soft voice, a woman, singing in the dusk. This transports him to a scene from his childhood, where as a boy he sat at the feet of his mother at the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings, listening to his mother singing to him. Despite the efforts of the poet to not indulge in the pastime of reminiscences, this memory calls to him and the insidious mastery of song  betrays him back.

The poet goes back to childhood in his memory, to old Sunday evenings at home, where his mother sat singing, whilst he pressed her feet, and enjoyed the cosy time. He is so immersed in the thoughts and emotions of his childhood that he is unable to enjoy the singing on the great black piano appassionato in the present. The poet feels that his manhood is cast as he returns mentally to his childhood and the way he felt as a child, sitting at his mothers knee, listening to her sing for him.

In this poem the poet depicts nostalgia, and the way a person experiences it. Whilst enjoying a pleasant evening, his mind reverts to memories of the past, a time when he was happy, when he was a little boy. Thinking about those times he longs for his childhood, weeping like a child for the past. At the same time, he feels guilty for wanting to remain embedded in childhood memories, because he feels that he is denigrating the present and all it holds by longing for the pleasures of the past.

The tragedy in this work can be seen as the inevitability of growing up, and of leaving behind the past. As the grown up poet looks back on his life and his childhood, he surely feels sorry that he has left behind his youth, and that now it is only a memory. He has left behind the happy times of his childhood, they are all now in the past, and cannot be retrieved or returned to. As the poet says, the glamour  of childish days is upon him.

It can be said that the passing of time is the worlds biggest tragedy and also the surest truth. Everyone grows up, and grows old, and dies. This can be seen as a tragedy, or it can be seen as a truth that teaches up the importance of living in the moment, of making the most of the present, because we never know how soon things change. This is the moral lesson of this poem, that living in the past, or feeling nostalgic for what has gone is pointless, what matters is living in the present, enjoying each moment, being present for each moment, for before we know it the present will become the past, just a distant memory.