Desert Island Poems: Piano by D. H. Lawrence
- Andrew Jamison
- Jul 4, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 16, 2025
Piano
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.
Near the end of his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers Lawrence writes of one of the characters “She (the mother) was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her.” Lawrence, by all accounts had a close relationship with his own mother, if we couldn’t have already guessed that from Piano, however her death and the ensuing grief was a major turning point in his writing. Piano was published in 1913 as part of Love Poems and Others, three years after the death of his mother. While entitled Piano, meaning softly, this is a searing poem about death, time’s passing, and the inescapability of memory. In twelve beautifully crafted lines, Lawrence presents us with melancholia writ large.
An Old Friend
This is another poem I’ve taught and continue to teach students as part of their GCSE Literature course, so I’ve been up close to it for a number of years, and it continues to be as powerful, if not more so, as when I first encountered it.
Passing of Time
Poems about the past, and time’s passing have always captivated me. I don’t think there’s another theme which poetry captures better than that of our brief lives on this spinning boulder we inhabit. In fact, I remember being interviewed by a radio presenter about my first book, and they remarked that it seemed quite nostalgic for someone only in their early twenties. At the time I didn’t know how to respond - should I have apologised? On reflection, I guess we write the poems that come to us, so if poems are nostalgic that’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, also how can we afford not to be nostalgic? To not be nostalgic would suggest that we aren’t conscious enough of time’s passing (that said, if we’re being too nostalgic we miss, as Heaney writes, ‘the comet’s pulsing rose’). This poem by Lawrence, is a poem which captures the inescapability of the past, simple childhood memories and how devastating they can be, because ultimately they signal that time has gone, and our childhoods are already over.
‘The insidious mastery of song’: Lawrence and Craft versus Passion
Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’ is perhaps his best known, and it is a magnificent poem about human interaction with animals (and I may well write a post on it soon) however the formality and concision of this poem are striking; what Lawrence manages to capture in 12 lines (thre quatrains with rhyming couplets) is nothing short of masterful. The rhyming couplets give the poem a sense of shape, almost like each couplet is a key on the piano. Indeed, how could he write about a piano without some kind of formal constraint. It seems to me that the piano itself is a symbol for the tension between the need for technique/discipline and the freedom of expression or the need for songs to played, as he writes himself, ‘appassionato’. So, the form of the poem itself is mimicking the tension bound up in the act of artistic endeavour. This tension in the artist's craft is referred to in the poem when he writes about ‘the insidious mastery of song/ betrays me back…’ ‘Insidious’ has connotations of something having a harmful effect very gradually, and it’s clear in the poem how Lawrence feels helpless in the face of this childhood memory, in the face of nostalgia, which he knows as a disciplined writer to be weary of, and yet it’s this nostalgia and his admittance of it which make the poem so tender and beguiling; in effect, the poet lets his guard down and what follows is ‘the flood of remembrance’ with ‘flood’, while hyperbolic, suggesting the unstoppable force of memory. The verb ‘betrays’ also suggests that he’s aware of the importance of keeping level-headed and managing this emotional tension, but yet is helpless in the face of it. These tensions, therefore, are at the heart of the poem: the tension between mastery and emotion; the tension between craft and passion; the tension between wanting to remember one’s childhood yet not being overcome by its loss.
Line Lengths
The longer lines of the poems have also intrigued me. In his other poems, Lawrence could not be said to be a formalist, in fact he wrote mostly in free verse, so what interests me here is how his lines overspill an iambic pentameter. Lines 3 and 4, for example, really over run by some way, to the point where they stick out on the page by quite some way. It is almost as if Lawrence’s emotions in the poem cannot be contained by a more conventional iambic line, so therefore we get these longer lines as seen at the end of the first quatrain.
Not a Sonnet?
The fact this is a 12 line poem, and not a sonnet, has also played on my mind. There is something about this poem which has the soul of a sonnet. It is after all a love poem to the past and to his mother, yet it ends at line 12. The overly long lines also make me wonder whether Lawrence himself wanted, at some point, for this to be a sonnet, but maybe had to settle for 12 lines, which ultimately works better, even if the long lines really are quite protruding.
The Title
The title is a place we should not look beyond, as piano has two meanings. On the one hand it means a piano, but on the other, it’s a term used in the world of music meaning ‘softly’. And, indeed, what does the poem begin with but ‘softly’. However, it’s a slightly misleading title in some ways, as the poem has a very hyperbolic almost melodramatic ending as the speaker is ‘cast/ down in the flood of remembrance’ with both ‘cast down’ (‘why are you cast down: O my soul?’ Psalm 42:5), ‘flood’ and ‘remembrance’ all having religious/grave connotations. The full rhymes in the poem, such as ‘clamour’ and ‘glamour’ also cannot be said to be ‘soft’ rhymes. So, this is a poem which builds as we go through it to a crescendo as opposed to a diminuendo, with the speaker not just crying but ‘weeping’ suggesting a more prolonged sense of sadness. ‘Weeping’ also has biblical connotations reminding us of the shortest verse in the bible ‘Jesus wept’, so it’s clear that Lawrence really wanted to end the poem with heightened emotions.
Shifts in Time
When I wrote about Ozymandias in a previous blog post I referred to how P.B. Shelley managed to pull off a great feat in squeezing three voices into a sonnet. What’s amazing about this poem is how Lawrence in twelve lines manages to shift timeframes three times. The poem starts with the speaker in the present hearing ‘a woman singing to me’, before being taken back down ‘the vista of years’ (such a powerful image at conjuring the scale of time) to a memory of being at the ‘feet of a mother who smiles as she sings…’ before returning us to present moment when ‘now it is vain for they singer to burst into clamour…’ What do these shifts in time do? They manage to give the poem a real sense of movement, depth, and surprise and show Lawrence’s skill in concision.
The Ending
At the end of the poem (and by the way, what an ending) I’ve always thought it was interesting how he finished with ‘I weep like a child for the past’ as opposed to ‘I weep for the past like a child’. However, due to his use of rhyming couplets, he needs ‘past’ to rhyme with ‘cast’ in the penultimate line. Also, ending with ‘the past’ really emphasises this idea that the speaker is weighed down by the past; Lawrence foregrounds it in this manner. The ending is climactic and really makes this poem so distinctive, and hiding the simile in the middle of the final phrase, also avoids ending on a simile which is a rather cliché way to finish off a poem. Instead finishing with ‘the past’ brings a sense of finality and finish to the poem, even if we are left with the speaker weeping in the present tense as opposed to him having ‘wept like a child for the past.’ The poem may have ended, but the speaker's grief is ongoing.
If you liked this poem and want to know more about Lawrence you should check out the following:
Read about more of my Desert Island Poems:
Piano by D. H. Lawrence
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