How to Like D.H. Lawrence’s Piano

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Piano DH Lawrence

A poem can sing to you, even if you don’t totally “get” it or enjoy every line.

“Piano,” by D.H. Lawrence, is not one of my overall favorite poems. It’s not a bad poem, of course, and I can’t pretend to even approach Lawrence’s levels of literary influence in my lifetime. However, references to “weeping” and “floods of remembrance” don’t grip me in the same way as precise, sensory details that invite me weep and remember. Which is precisely why this poem sticks with me.

In the first stanza, a woman’s voice seeps through the dusk like the soft, remaining glow of light. The speaker, drawn into this beauty, experiences an out-of-body memory and imagines himself as a child many years ago.

The next two lines are what grab me:

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.

What I love about this memory is the full sensory appeal of it, especially the sense of touch. I feel the vibration of the strings under the piano–both the “boom” of the bass notes and the strains of the “tingling strings,” words whose similar sounds cause the music to tremble under my own skin. The tender detail of the child “pressing the small, poised feet” of his mother is just unusual enough to make the scene real to me. Specific is universal. I can imagine a child touching his mother’s feet because of my own children, who affectionately tug my sweater sashes, knee me in the butt, or whack my head with coloring books.

In Everything That Makes You Mom, author Laura Lynn Brown asks readers to recall memories of their mothers in specific situations, such as concocting treats in the kitchen, driving, playing, or tending plants. By imagining and recording these scenes in writing (remember, imagining is image-ing), readers not only reward themselves with rich pictures from the past but can give their mothers the invaluable gift of showing how they noticed things all those years.

My mom is not a musician. She’s creative, yes, but as a master quilter, builder of Victorian dollhouses, and any other task requiring an eye for detailed design. The images of my mother embroidering calico brown wedding rings and laying tiny shingles one by one on gabled roofs will never leave me. But these wonders were wrought in her own private moments as I stood in the background. We did share some important times together, however. And they did not take place alongside a musical instrument, easel, or Great American Novel.

Every Saturday night, during my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s, my mom and I watched The Love Boat while sharing a one-pound bag of M&Ms. We weren’t the snuggliest family in the world, but once a week we put our feet up, threw comforters over our legs, and huddled with a bag of candy between us. Of course The Love Boat was not a masterpiece. Plot lines were predictable and corny. Charo was a frequent guest star. But it was “our thing.” In fact, one year my mom gave me a sterling silver heart necklace to commemorate our sweet ritual, and even when I returned from college on the weekends, years after The Love Boat went off the air, I would find a large bag of M&Ms awaiting me on my bed.

As a mother, I wonder what close moments my children will remember. Hugging my son as I walk into his first-grade classroom as a volunteer? Squeezing through clothing racks with my oldest daughter at the mall? Lying next to my middle daughter as she paints watercolor flowers while on her bed? (Yep. I’ve decided to let her paint in bed.)

A whole poem can capture you, each word catching more and more of your breath until you’re dizzy with wonder. Sometimes just part of a poem does it: a stanza, line, or word. This is what “Piano” has done for me, releasing my own, okay, I’ll say it—flood of memories.

Give every poem a chance to explore you. You’ll never know what will sing.

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

Photo by Michael Schrempp, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Tania Runyan, author of How to Read a Poem.

Dog’s Death by Updike Does Its Work

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Dog's Death John Updike Cute Puppy Picture

 
 
I was not always a dog lover. In fact, for most of my life I found any chance I could to deride the codependent beasts in favor of self-respecting felines. My disdain for dogs was well known, even a badge of my identity.

One afternoon, after a tiring two hours of teaching The Scarlet Letter to high schoolers, I went back to my department office and slumped down at my desk. This photocopied poem lay before me:

 
 

Dog’s Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

—John Updike

Mark, a quiet, middle-aged English teacher who sat nearby, briefly made eye contact with me, then looked back down at his stack of papers.

“I don’t like dog poems,” I said.

“Just read it,” he replied.

So I did. I read the poem and set it back down. “Not gonna work,” I said, and rolled my eyes.

What I didn’t tell Mark, and what I didn’t admit to myself for several years, is that the poem did work on me, first with that immediate wallop of guilt I felt as I slipped the poem in the recycling bin and avoided the expectant gaze of dogs for the next several days, then with the slow unraveling of images deep inside me.

The ruptured liver. The heart lying down. The weak attempt at a bite.

And, of course, the splattered newspaper.

In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins tells us to “walk inside the poem’s room/and feel the walls for a light switch.”

That switch is the “ah-ha moment” in a poem, the moment that shocks us awake to a feeling or idea, illuminating the poem as a whole. In “Dog’s Death,” the rather embarrassingly unpleasant but beautifully loving picture of a dog trying to please his owners up to the moment of death lit up the entire poem for me. Strange as it sounds, a soiled newspaper incarnated the fierce love between a family and their pet. This image slowly chiseled away at my heart, even when I tried to forget the poem.

I understood the truth in this image years before I would realize that I would not only tolerate, but need dogs in my life, that what I was maligning about them–their seemingly naive and insistent desire to please–was what made them tender companions.

It would take many positive encounters with dogs, family discussions, and compromises to reach the decision to adopt Toby, a rat terrier, from a rescue organization. But the work started years before, with a poet’s moving images and words turning on the light.

Good poem.

Photo by Sukanto Debnath, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Tania Runyan, author of How to Read a Poem.

5 Great Tips for Reading Poetry Aloud

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Yellow Flower How to Read a Poem Aloud

Formal poetry-recitation projects and competitions are important artistic ventures. However, sometimes we just want—or need—to read a poem aloud spontaneously, whether during a class discussion, solo reading time, or Mischief Café.

How can we read a poem aloud in a way that captures its essence?

The following five tips will help you celebrate a poem by reading it aloud with intentionality and confidence. We’ll use Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese 43,” one of the most-recited poems, as a model.

 
Sonnets from the Portuguese 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

1) Pay Attention to Lines (But Not Too Much)

When reading a poem aloud, remember, you are dealing partly with lines. Poet David Wright, author of The Small Books of Bach, likens a poetic line to a measure of music. Just as measures in a musical piece flow and connect with one another without jarring separations, so poetry lines keep their shapes, their individual counts.

When reading a poem aloud, think of the end of a line as signaling a slight pause, even if the line ends without punctuation. On the other hand, if you linger too long, you end up with a kind of marching song or limerick effect. Remember, lingering isn’t loitering. What is the impact of letting these lines from Browning’s sonnet linger for just a moment (but not too long)?

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

2) Pay attention to sentences

One of the top complaints poetry readers receive regards their use of Poet Voice. What is the trademark characteristic of Poet Voice? Reading every sentence, including declaratives, like a question? Perhaps that habit removes emotional depth and variety from a poem?

Paying attention to sentences means paying attention to punctuation. Often, beginning readers of poetry gloss over punctuation, not only employing Poet Voice but ignoring the subtle differences between commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation points, and dashes.

Browning’s sonnet employs the question mark at the beginning, of course, and a semicolon near the end. How might this mid-line break influence a reader’s expression? What would a reader lose if he or she were to treat the semicolon like “just another comma?”

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

3) Slow down and let the language come alive

Remember, you are reading a poem, not a market report. Don’t think about communicating information, but emotion and story. The poet makes language choices that are as subtle—and powerful—as our own facial expressions and body language. When you come across sound-play in a poem, such as alliteration, internal rhyme or repetition, don’t be afraid to emphasize it. A poem is a very small story, in its way, and your emotional expressions will help tell it.

How can you emphasize, yet vary, the repetition in these lines?

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use

4) Target a line or two as your “nerve center” for highest expression

Of course every word of a poem deserves careful consideration. But as a reader, you will most likely find a line or two that really resonate with you. Luxuriate over those lines. Slow them down; adjust the volume high or low; pause between words. Don’t hold back.

Consider two of my favorites:

I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I connect with these two lines because they seem to speak to a long-term, deep relationship. As one who has been married for twenty-one years (and married at twenty-one), I find a gentle, but strong, beauty here. Even without punctuation, I feel the need to focus on “thee” with a slight pause after the word and draw out “every.” I can practically whisper “sun and candle-light,” mirroring the light’s peaceful flickers.

5) Be human

Remember, you are speaking to people. Even when reading to yourself alone in a room, you’re sharing poetry with a person worthy of your attention. Keep good public speaking practices in mind, such as confident posture and eye contact. If you can prepare beforehand by memorizing an entire poem or at least the beginning of its lines, do so. If you are reading in the moment, still look up from time to time, and don’t worry if it takes you a moment to find your place. If anything, it will help you slow down the language. Enjoy the moment; it is what the poem was written for.


Photo by Gemma Stiles, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Tania Runyan, author of How to Read a Poem.

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