D. H. Lawrence’s poetry is said to often be of “great biographical interest” (Encyclopedia Britannica), and his poem “Piano,” written in 1918, eight years after the death of his mother, illustrates his attachment to his mother through the device of an unwilling memory evoked when he hears a woman singing. Though Lawrence’s relationship with his mother is said to have been “an intensely—often labeled abnormally—close relationship” (Pearson and Watson), it is also said that it was she who encouraged him to obtain an education and to write. His mother was a teacher, and according to Norton, it is her “delicacy and refinement” that he “allied” himself with rather than his less educated, coarse coal miner father (2248). It is she whom he sided with in the conflict-ridden relationship he witnessed between his parents.
According to Wart, “Piano” expresses Lawrence’s personal response when a “song stirs memories of childhood and his mother,” involuntary as these memories may be. However, though it may be true that we should never assume that the speaker of a poem is, indeed, the poet, according to Semansky, “Lawrence's work invites us to, as he has always woven autobiographical material into his writing.” Lawrence’s “Piano” may thus be considered to be the recounting of unwanted and involuntary emotional memory brought about as a response to music.
“Piano” begins by describing a setting conducive to reflection and remembrance, “Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me” (Line 1). Intimacy is implied in the setting: “the dusk,” the singing being “soft” and seemingly personally directed to one individual all lend themselves to an aura of intimacy. This encounter draws Lawrence back through the “vista of years” (Line 2). In fact,...
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One might wonder why Brooks produces poetry, especially the sonnet, if she also condemns it. I would suggest that by critically reckoning the costs of sonnet-making Brooks brings to her poetry a self-awareness that might justify it after all. She creates a poetry that, like the violin playing she invokes, sounds with "hurting love." This "hurting love" reminds us of those who may have been hurt in the name of the love for poetry. But in giving recognition to that hurt, it also fulfills a promise of poetry: to be more than a superficial social "grace," to teach us something we first did not, or did not wish to, see.
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Lawrence explores the idea that when an individual who constantly seeks love from another is faced with competing demands, this individual is inclined to sacrifice self-preservation in order to make someone else happy, resulting in an ultimate misery in the
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All the novels of Lawrence are more or less autobiographical. But Sons and Lovers is almost a carbon copy of the author’s life. The principal characters of the novel and the central situations are drawn from Lawrence’s early life. Like Paul Morel’s father, Lawrence’s father was a miner, uncultured and drunk. Like Paul’s mother, Lawrence’s mother was her husband’s direct opposite. A triangular relationship grew between Lawrence, Jessie and his mother and that become the theme of Sons and Lovers which remains the most compelling account of the Oedipus complex in Literature.
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