The Complete Guide to Piano
A song in a dark room, a trapdoor into 1890, and a grown man who loses.
Introduction
- Twelve lines, and a man in tears — Why Piano is tougher and stranger than it first looks
The world behind the poem
- A collier’s son and a mother who wanted more — D. H. Lawrence, Eastwood, and the woman behind “a mother”
- The instrument at the centre of the house — What a piano meant in a working-class parlour before recorded music
Through the poem
- Stanza one — the trapdoor opens — “Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me”
- Stanza two — the man fights back — “In spite of myself… betrays me back”
- Stanza three — the flood — “So now it is vain…” — the surrender, in slow motion
The speaker & voices
- The man who loses — A voice constructed to have no agency
- Two women, two pianos — Why the dead one wins
The writer’s craft
- The craft I — a child’s form for an adult’s breakdown — Quatrains, couplets, anapaests and the overloaded line
- The craft II — sound, water and the fortress of warmth — Three systems that do all the emotional work
Interpretations
- Is Piano sentimental? The hundred-year argument — The poem that taught English departments how to read
- Four ways to read the ending — Tragedy, liberation, psychoanalysis, and the unreliable past
The examination
- Choosing your second poem — The four partners, and what each one proves
- The exam itself — 45 minutes, 30 marks, two printed poems — How to spend the time, and where the marks actually are