D. H. Lawrence's Piano

Sentimentality as a Challenge to Masculinity

Feb 24, 2009 Savannah Schroll Guz

Lawrence's three-quatrain lyric reveals the insidious effect of memory and the emotion that attends it.

In the first quatrain of “Piano”, Lawrence sets the scene: near evening, a woman sings and softly plays piano for the speaker. His description suggests a private concert in an intimate, half-darkened room. Almost instantly, the experience returns the speaker to his childhood, when he crouched beneath the keyboard of the parlor piano at which his mother sat.

Vivid is his explanation of the piano’s fulminating vibrato as the hammers hit the strings. These vibrant aural elements, which are part of the speaker’s memory, are similar to the sensory associations of remembering—like the overwhelming sound the speaker experienced as a child seated at the piano’s base, so too is the emotionally overpowering nature of remembering that moment of his childhood.

Emotion and Masculinity

In the second quatrain, the speaker expresses his attitude towards this swift, involuntary sentimentality. Phrases like “in spite of myself”, “insidious mastery of song” both in line five and “betrays me back” in line six indicate the speaker’s distinct unwillingness to submit to the music’s treacherous ploy.

Yet, it is not until the final quatrain that we fully understand his unwillingness to submit. The music and its power to evoke emotion robs him of strength, releasing the floodgate of feeling in the form of tears. With his “manhood cast/Down in the flood of remembrance”, he weeps, an act considered inappropriate for a man.

Ideal manhood in Lawrence’s time, involved self-control, restraint, temperance, and industry. In his 1923 book, Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence writes that the “essential American soul” is “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.” In the age of Freud, women, by contrast, were condemned for their strong emotion, which was believed to bubble up from the womb in the form of hysteria, excitability and excessive anxiety—the perfect foil for conceptions of toughened manhood. It appears that music, here associated closely with women themselves, is treacherous and robs the speaker of his manhood, just as women were perceived to infect men with undesired softness.

A Lyric Poem

Originally sung and accompanied by lyre playing, lyric poetry was, in ancient times, filled with word play and melodious verbal combinations. With the invention of the printing press, however, the character of lyric poetry changed. Such poems could be considered on the page, and word choice and message became more substantive and thoughtful. By the time Lawrence wrote “Piano” in 1918, lyric poetry had long bore three requisite elements: they were short, often (but not always) told in the first person, and must express the speaker’s unmistakable emotion. Lawrence’s poem conforms to each of these standards, making the work a prime example of modern lyric poetry.

Lawrence, perhaps better known for his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose explicit sexual depictions earned him life-long persecution, offers a confirmation of his conception of manhood in his lyric poem, “Piano.” Here, the poet reviles not himself for his breakdown at the sound of the music and the memories that it brings. Instead he disparages the treachery of the song for inciting tears and eroding his sense of manhood.

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Lawrence in 1906, age 21