Piano – D.H.Lawrence

As the snows swirls sideways across my window, I re-read this poem and fall in love with D.H.Lawrence all over again. I feel as though his poetry is not celebrated as much as his so-called “dirty books” but to me, the poems are heady scraps of wisdom and depth, showing what a sensitive, insightful and thoughtful person he really was.

This poem is especially poignant to me because as a very young child, I remember crouching at the top of the stairs, hours after I had been sent to bed and straining my ears to catch what my parents and their friends (probably slightly tipsy) were singing as my mother played our stylin’, state-of-the-art Sixties organ and everyone sang along.

Sometimes it was a slowed down, heart twisting ballad called “Old Faithful” one of the opening lines being “We rode the range together …” and of course culminated in their parting ways and the horse going on to Other Pastures. At this point I would be weeping so hard that the playing would stop abruptly and someone would be sent to collect me from the stairs and briefly, my mother would kindly invite me into the very bright light of the living room, where I stood shyly blinking in pink and yellow flannelette amidst a circle of smiling guests and a haze of Chanel No 5 and cigarette smoke.

I was sometimes offered a ginger ale and a bit of a cuddle to restore me. I was also then allowed to sit very closely, next to my mother’s warmth as she (perhaps a bit insensitively) went on to finish the song.

Schmaltzy as all this may sound now, I do long for a time past when my sadness could be dispatched so efficiently and so completely.

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.

D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

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