Image of memory and nostalgia: An Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Piano”
D. H. Lawrence’s melancholic poem Piano shows a man who is experiencing nostalgia as he listens to a woman singing which reminds him of his childhood. Striking as the poem is, the crucial elements of poetry are well woven into the text as the speaker narrates about the present moment and his past memory. How did the poet achieve such a natural combination within the text? This paper would discuss about the elements of poetry embedded in the poem as the narrative unfolds.
From the opening line of “Piano” we see from the perspective of the speaker, who waxes nostalgic as he listens to a woman singing to him in the evening. The first-person point of view gives us the indication that the speaker is undergoing strong emotional feelings over the song. The “boom of the tingling strings,”(3) an aural image, echoes the suddenness with which the memory hits the speaker, and, as readers, we are left in the same place as the speaker.
The speaker takes a bittersweet tone, which is also strongly nostalgic through out the poem. The man in the poem has traveled the road of life and has reached his adulthood, a phase of life, which is associated with freedom of, will and power. But he still contemplates giving all that up; his heart “weeps to belong” and his “manhood is cast down a flood of remembrance” as the “glamor of childish days” overcomes him emotionally.(9-11) He breaks the unspoken rule that men aren’t supposed to show emotions by crying for his childhood, which reflects a tone for the past and memory.
Memory itself, as a central idea apart from nostalgia in the poem, performs the link between past and present. Within the poem, Lawrence forms the internal structure with several images of past and present, which at the same time builds up the larger image—situation and setting. The poem takes