The poem "Piano" by David Herbert Richards Lawrence

Introduction:David Herbert Richards Lawrence was a very important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. The passing of time in a person's life is filled with many different stages. The poem "Piano" by D.H. Lawrence is a complicated example of how a poet might think.

D. H. Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, a coal-mining village in Nottinghamshire England and died from Tuberculosis on March 2, 1930.

Analysis:The poem 'piano' is a very bewildering poem, as there are many different ways of analysing the poem.

The speaker in "Piano" seems to be proud to be a full grown man, yet he loves remembering his happy childhood, and this nostalgic attitude causes him to feel guilty as if he has betrayed his present state of being, though other readers might think differently.

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Through effective imagery, Lawrence is able to help the reader understand the speaker's nostalgic attitude. The language is intimate and conversational. It is also the language of narrative as the speaker is telling it like a story, building up a climax.

In the first stanza, the author describes an image of the present in the first two lines, and then the last two lines are spent describing his comfortable past. A woman is performing and singing for him. The speaker creates an interesting atmosphere by using the word ‘softly’ and setting the action at dusk. The woman’s singing opens up the speaker’s memory, taking him back in time, "Taking me back down the vista of years". He then sees himself as a child playing with his mother’s feet as she sings for him at a piano. He remembers the great noise made by the...