Modern American Poetry

(^408) Anita Patterson
To the old Sunday evenings, when darkness wandered outside
And hymns gleamed on our warm lips, as we watched mother’s
fingers glide.
Or this is my sister at home in the old front room
Singing love’s first surprised gladness, alone in the gloom.
She will start when she sees me, and blushing, spread out her hands
To cover my mouth’s raillery, till I’m bound in her shame’s heart
spun bands
A woman is singing me a wild Hungarian air
And her arms, and her bosom, and the whole of her soul is bare,
And the great black piano is clamouring as my mother’s never could
clamour
And my mother’s tunes are devoured of this music’s ravaging
glamour.^33
“Piano” is as much about the creative hunger to absorb different
cultural influences, and the threat it poses to the cherished individuality of
regions, as it is about the fateful vying for dominance among the major
European powers in the decades preceding the Great War. The “wild
Hungarian air” (a phrase Lawrence omitted in the final version of the poem)
recalls the intensification of European nationalist rivalries during this
period.^34 The poem is built on a perceived contrast between, on the one
hand, the speaker’s present experience of the “clamouring” sound of a sleek
black concert hall piano and a song that bares a woman’s soul to the public;
and, on the other, his secretly erotic childhood memories of his mother and
sister performing hymns and love songs at home. By searching for hidden
continuities between the raging, devouring glamour associated with
Hungarian music and the speaker’s fond memories of British middle-class
musical culture, Lawrence discloses the speaker’s painful ambivalence toward
the sentiment awakened in him by the song.^35
“Piano” also refers, more broadly, to the changing of European musical
experience and sensibility from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth
century. Concert life and musical tastes were dramatically transformed in the
Allied countries during and after the Great War. Fewer keyboard battle
pieces, for example, were written then than at the height of romantic
nationalism during the nineteenth century, and composers began to turn
their attention to serious vocal and orchestral laments. In the Allied
countries there was a growing tendency to ban concert performances of