Grade 9 Notes: Piano
Piano is twelve lines long, so revise it at word level: this is a poem you can know completely. Learn the three-stanza shape first (seduction → struggle → collapse), then the war vocabulary the speaker uses against his own memory (“in spite of myself”, “insidious”, “betrays”, “vain”), then the comparison pairings — Section B is a comparative essay, and the second poem you choose is half your answer. Every quotation here is the genuine 1918 text; the poem is printed in the exam paper, so your job is not memorisation but knowing in advance which words you will close-read.
Character studies
The speaker
A grown man losing an argument with his own heart — in real time
The speaker of Piano is a man built by the masculine code of his age: composed, adult, in control — and the poem is the twelve-line record of that control failing. A woman is singing to him in the dusk; the song opens a trapdoor to his childhood, to Sunday evenings under his mother’s piano; and he fights the memory with the vocabulary of betrayal and war — “in spite of myself”, “insidious”, “betrays”, “vain” — before losing completely: “I weep like a child for the past.” Crucially, he narrates the defeat in the present tense, so the reader watches the collapse happen rather than hearing about it afterwards. He is not a nostalgic man enjoying a memory; he is a man being taken somewhere he swore not to go — and the poem’s honesty about wanting and resisting the past at once is what lifts it above sentimentality.
The mother
Feet, a smile, a song — the poem’s absent victor
The mother of Piano never speaks, is never named, and is never seen whole — the poem gives her only “small, poised feet”, a smile, and the hymn-evening world she conducted from the piano stool. Yet she is the poem’s victor: from memory, possibly from beyond death, she out-sings a living performer and reclaims her son so completely that he ends the poem weeping “like a child”. She is built entirely from a child’s sensory viewpoint — which means readers meet not a woman but a worship: the poem preserves what the child felt, not who the mother was. Biographical readers connect her to Lydia Lawrence, the pious, refined mother Lawrence adored and lost in 1910 — a fact-level link worth knowing, though on this exam it earns nothing and the poem never names her either.
Thesis statements
- Piano is not a poem about enjoying a memory but about losing a fight with one: the treachery lexis — “in spite of myself”, “insidious”, “betrays”, “vain” — casts song as conqueror and the speaker’s own heart as the defector, so the closing tears read as a defeat rather than an indulgence.
- Lawrence writes an adult breakdown in a child’s verse form: three quatrains of AABB couplets import the music of hymn and nursery rhyme into a poem about a grown man weeping, so the form is itself the regression the final line describes.
- The poem is decided by a contest of volume it loses on purpose — a professional’s “clamour… appassionato” defeated by a remembered “tinkling” — arguing that performed feeling can never reach the place where involuntary body-memory already lives.
- Piano’s structure is a study in grammatical regression: “a child” in stanza one, “the heart of me” and “our” in stanza two, “I weep” in stanza three, so the pronouns complete the collapse two lines before the simile announces it.
- The mother’s power in the poem is a function of her incompleteness — feet, a smile, a sound, no name and no words — and the living singer loses precisely because she has a body, a volume and a present tense to be measured against.
- The poem’s turning point is a punctuation mark: the mid-line full stop after “appassionato” silences the present in the middle of its own crescendo, so Lawrence locates the volta of a twelve-line lyric in a single caesura.
- Piano half-admits that what overwhelms the speaker may be an enchantment rather than a truth — “glamour” in its older sense of a spell cast on the eyes — so the poem mourns not only a lost world but the impossibility of ever seeing it accurately.
Essay plans
- Compare how the poets present powerful memories in Piano and Poem at Thirty-Nine. — Both poets make a dead parent survive as physical ritual in the body of the living, but the two poems stand on opposite sides of that inheritance: Walker’s open free verse travels willingly toward the father and converts memory into competence, while Lawrence’s locked AABB couplets are a defence that memory overruns — so the anthology sets the same material as gift and as ambush.
- Compare the ways the poets present childhood in Piano and Half-past Two. — Fanthorpe and Lawrence both reconstruct a child’s consciousness from an adult distance, but Fanthorpe lends the poem the child’s own language and lets him escape adult time, while Lawrence holds the child at third-person arm’s length until the distance collapses — so one poem gives childhood a voice and the other measures what it costs a man to be given it back.
- Compare how the poets present strong feelings in Piano and Do not go gentle into that good night. — Both poets pour an overwhelming emotion into a strict, repetitive inherited form, but the forms deliver opposite verdicts: Thomas’s villanelle is built on compulsory return, so its speaker can command to the final line, while Lawrence’s couplets are broken open by enjambment — resistance sustained by form against resistance defeated by it.