Poem of the Day: ‘Piano’
For more than half a century, readers thought of D.H. Lawrence as a symbol for the licentious and the carnal. Now, with cooler eyes, we can see the nuances in his work.
For more than half a century, general readers thought of D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) mostly as a sex fiend: a symbol for the licentious and the carnal. And thus Lawrence was spurned or embraced, depending on how one felt about what was quaintly called “Free Love.” Literary critics struggled to force recognition that such novels as “Sons and Lovers,” ”The Rainbow,” and even “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” were high-modernist achievements, but they succeeded only once Lawrence ceased much to be read as a cultural symbol. And now, with cooler eyes, we can look and see the nuances in his work. In the poem “Piano,” for example, he uses trochaic quatrains to paint a scene of failed seduction: A woman, singing passionate songs to him at the piano, brings to memory being at his mother’s feet. And “now it is vain for the singer” to continue her seduction. “The glamour / Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast / Down in the flood of remembrance.”
Piano
by D.H. Lawrence
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
