Today’s Poem: Piano

A failed seduction of D.H. Lawrence

Poul Friis Nybo’s Woman at the Piano, c. 1920 (Wikimedia Commons)

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) is a better poet than his casual readers are readers of his poetry. Or so at least it might seem when we consider the lingering effect of R v Penguin Books, the 1960 obscenity trial about the British publication of Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

As it happens, Lawrence’s publishers won the notorious trial, but a consequence was that Lawrence existed in the public imagination for the next 50 years mostly as a sex fiend: an evangelist of the sexual revolution (in its early instantiation as “Free Love”), to be canonized or anathematized according to one’s view of all that. And, of course, Lawrence was pictured entirely as a novelist — author of Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and the rest — and not also as a young Georgian poet who made the turn into modernism.

Literary critics spent decades trying to force recognition that his works were, in fact, high-modernist achievements. And they succeeded — but only once Lawrence ceased to be read much at all. His fading as a cultural symbol made possible a better judgment of his writing but among a diminished audience. In these days of Only Fans and Pornhub, who would bother to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the frisson of the sex?

Whatever’s left of that old picture of him as a sex-novelist could lead us to expect that his poetry would be poetic yawps about his sexual freedom and prowess. But Lawrence is better than such easy self-aggrandizements. His best poems often reveal a mortifying self-reflection or a recognition of his own diminishment and failure.

In the 1923 “Snake,” for example, he recounts seeing a poisonous snake drinking at a water trough in Sicily. He cannot bring himself to kill it, either because he’s too admiring or because he’s too afraid. But as the snake leaves, he awkwardly and ineffectively throws a chunk of wood at it — the worst of reactions. And the poet realizes that “I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of life. / And I have something to expiate: / A pettiness.”

Something similar is present in “The Enkindled Spring,” a 1916 poem in which Lawrence describes the season as it “bursts up in bonfires”: a torrent of imagery for a world ablaze with new-green fire. Weak poets — striving to be, say, ersatz Walt Whitmans — would go on to proclaim themselves joined to this seasonal blaze: a phallic tower of spring’s force, a yonic frenzy that creates new life.

But as Lawrence notices his own amazement at “this conflagration,” he turns to self-reflection, the What am I? of existential doubt, realizing that he is not the fire but part of the unlit shadows that waver between the flames: “a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.”

D.H. Lawrence in a 1915 photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “Piano,” may be the peak of this line in D.H. Lawrence. His three stanzas — quatrains rhymed aabb — have a curious meter: a falling rhythm, loosely trochaic, that grows from five stresses in the first two lines of each stanza, to six in the third line, and seven in the fourth. The effect is a building toward something, and yet not toward what we might expect from a seduction poem.

A woman sits at the piano, singing a passionate song, seeking to allure her listener. But the scene causes that listener to remember sitting under a piano as a child, his little hands on the feet of his mother (a perfect detail) as she plays the old hymns on a Sunday evening in the parlor.

“So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour / With the great black piano appassionato,” Lawrence tells us. The woman’s attempt at seduction has failed, because “the insidious mastery of song” has pulled the listener back in time, and “The glamour / Of childish days” is upon him. He realizes that his childhood has in equal parts shaped him and undone him — with both of these captured in the phrase “cast down”: His manhood is cast (in the sense of formed) down in his childhood, and his manhood is cast down (in the sense of a deflated phallic desire) by a memory of that childhood: his mother, the hymns, the cozy Sunday parlor. He is even cast down in the sense of his adulthood washed away, lost “in the flood of remembrance” as he weeps “like a child for the past.”

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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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Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Woman at the Piano, c. 1910 (Wikimedia Commons)

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