Piano - D.H. Lawrence

Piano

By D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

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.

1918

I really enjoyed this poem this week because it has so many elements that speak to me.  When first reading it, I love the smooth and comforting tone that this poem brings.  Smooth and comforting are my favorite adjectives to use when actually listening to and/or playing the piano.  Combining the tone with the rhyme scheme and different line lengths, the effect kind of makes me feel like I am literally listening to the piano or my mom singing along with a piano.

The diction of the poem is like a grand piano in that is flows very smoothly with the ambiance and elegance of a grand piano.  The rhyming of the poem is very suiting to the poem because it is rhythmical like playing a song on the piano.  And ther are many hard sounds like "appasionato" or "black" or "tinkling" that remind me of staccato type notes.  Staccato means light separation between notes.  And the words such as "clamour" or  "glamour" or "rememberance" remind me of more legato type notes (longer held notes).

This poem makes me want to go back to the piano.  I used to love playing it until my mother made me practice so much that I eventually lost interest in the songs that I was playing.  I was eventually playing for others and not for myself and that's where I didn't want to be.  It's those moments that on a quiet afternoon, I make something beautiful out of nothing that made days brighter.  And I think this poem captures that brightness.

Design - Robert Frost (1936)

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small. This poem can be found in The Norton Introduction to Poetry on page 297. My intuitive response to this poem is that Frost really paints a picture in my mind of a white spider holding a moth probably in its mouth on a blue and elegant flower and he wants us to think about how beauty and death do not necessarily have to be in different frames of mind.  The quote from The Sounds of Poetry, "the line and the syntactical unit are not necessarily the same" can be applied to this poem in the first stanza.  The quote means that although the first stanza is, in itself, is one sentence, each line of the stanza has a specific meaning and importance to the poem and that is why there is enjambment to the breaks after words like "moth" and "blight".  Another thing I noticed when analyzing this poem was that the largest accents were in the one syllable words at the end of each line.  I enjoyed the fact that there were not many largely accented words in the middle of lines which let me read the lines very quickly and then I could take a pause at the end of the line.  Also, each line had either 10 or 11 syllables and the only lines that did not rhyme were the first line of the first stanza and second line of the second stanza. This design of the poem makes reading very smooth and easy (in a good way) to me.   The first stanza is very classical ekphrasis in that Frost describes the artistic beauty of what is happening between the spider and the moth on the flower.  The second stanza turns to modern ekphrasis because Frost starts asking rhetorical questions to the reader and starts to engage the reader into answering questions on why and how this piece of art in front of him came to be. A reading of the poem can be found on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJuEsIRc530.