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D.H. Lawrence · Edexcel IGCSE Anthology
Edexcel IGCSE Literatureby D.H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, essayist and painter, best known for Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and the once-banned Lady Chatterley's Lover. He wrote searchingly about relationships, industrial society and the body. His work is famous for its emotional honesty - Lawrence believed that emotional repression was one of the great sicknesses of modern life.
Lawrence had an extraordinarily close relationship with his mother, Lydia Lawrence. She was an educated, genteel woman who had married a coal-miner and was disappointed by the marriage. She pinned her hopes on her clever son. Lawrence was devoted to her and her death in 1910 was a devastating blow - he described it later as the end of his youth. His novel Sons and Lovers (1913) is largely about this mother-son bond.
"Piano" was first drafted around 1906-08 and rewritten several times before appearing in New Poems in 1918. Lawrence was famously self-critical and rewrote the poem in prose-like drafts before settling on the final version. In an earlier draft he had tried to defend his adult, artistic self against the memory - but the final version surrenders to it.
The "cosy parlour" with Sunday hymns around the piano is a characteristic scene of late-Victorian and Edwardian family life. Before radio and television, families often entertained themselves by singing together at the piano, particularly on Sundays after church. The piano was the emotional centre of many middle-class and aspiring working-class homes.
The poem is striking for how openly it admits to an adult man being overwhelmed to tears. In the Edwardian world of "stiff upper lip" masculinity, weeping in public was considered shameful. Lawrence's willingness to write "my manhood is cast down" - to admit that adult self-control has failed - is deeply unusual for his period.
“Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me”
The opening line establishes the hush and the trance-like mood. "Softly" is a gentle adverb that sets the emotional volume of the whole poem - nothing is loud until stanza 3. "Dusk" is a liminal time between day and night, which mirrors the speaker's position between adult consciousness and childhood memory. The woman is "singing to me", not at me - it feels intimate and addressed.
“pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings”
The poem's warmest, most tactile memory. The child is physically touching his mother's feet as she plays. "Small, poised feet" is a careful, precise image - Lawrence sees his mother as a complete person, not a generic figure. "Smiles as she sings" is a picture of pure, unguarded happiness - the thing that the adult speaker most wants to belong to again.
“In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song / Betrays me back”
Lawrence is wrestling with the memory. "In spite of myself" admits resistance - he does not want to feel this. "Insidious" gives the song a treacherous, almost dangerous quality. "Mastery" makes the song a master over him, the listener a helpless servant. "Betrays me back" uses "betray" in both its senses: the song is a traitor dragging him unwillingly, and it exposes the truth of what he really longs for.
“the heart of me weeps to belong / To the old Sunday evenings at home”
The emotional centre of the poem. Lawrence uses "the heart of me" rather than simply "I" - it feels like the weeping is happening inside him, beneath his conscious self. "To belong" is the crucial word: he does not just want to remember childhood, he wants to be back in it, to be part of it again. The longing is for belonging, not merely for the past.
“the great black piano appassionato”
The present-day singer and her grand black piano are deliberately made to sound showy and theatrical. "Great" (large), "black" (dramatic) and the Italian musical term "appassionato" (passionately) all combine to give the present performance a showroom quality. The implicit contrast with the "tinkling piano" of his childhood is devastating: the grand present-day performance cannot compete with the loving domesticity of his mother at the piano.
“my manhood is cast / Down in the flood of remembrance”
The most self-revealing line in the poem. "Manhood" is literally adult masculinity - the self-control and composure the Edwardian man was supposed to maintain. "Cast down" means struck down, defeated. The adult armour has failed. The "flood of remembrance" is a metaphor of being overwhelmed - memory as water breaking through a dam. This image of manhood "cast down" in a flood is almost biblical in scale.
“I weep like a child for the past”
The final line and the poem's emotional collapse. The adult speaker weeps "like a child" - the simile completes the poem's circle, because the first stanza gave an image of the child under the piano. He has been reduced to what he was remembering. "For the past" is the object of his grief - not any specific event, but the very state of being in the past. This is the purest expression of nostalgia in the poem.
“down the vista of years, till I see”
Lawrence imagines memory as a long landscape view - a "vista" - opening in front of him. This turns memory into a physical space you can walk into, rather than an abstract act of thinking. It also prepares the reader for the idea that he is being pulled somewhere, not actively recalling.
“small, poised feet… smiles as she sings”
The soft, hissing "s" sounds in stanza 1 create a hushed, lullaby-like texture. Sibilance makes the memory feel tender and intimate, as if the whole scene is being whispered. The sound itself enacts the "softly" of the first word.
“the insidious mastery of song / Betrays me back”
The song is personified as a manipulative, almost malicious agent - "insidious", "mastery", "betrays". Giving music a human will lets Lawrence excuse his own loss of control: he is not being weak, he is being overpowered. It also captures how sneaky nostalgia can be.
“tinkling piano (memory) vs. great black piano appassionato (present)”
The two pianos are set directly against each other. "Tinkling" is light, homely, domestic; "great black piano" is serious, theatrical, grand. The contrast makes the point that the present cannot compete with the past. The adjectives do all the work.
“Down in the flood of remembrance”
Memory is imagined as a flood that knocks him off his feet. The flood metaphor is powerful because it is uncontrollable - you cannot resist water rising. Lawrence's "manhood is cast down" the way a building is cast down in a real flood. The metaphor makes the collapse feel natural, not weak.
“A child sitting under the piano… I weep like a child for the past”
The first stanza gives an image of the child, and the poem ends with the adult speaker returning to the same state. The circularity is the poem's quiet argument: time does not move in a line. Memory and music can put you back exactly where you started.
Piano is one of the Part 3 poems in the Edexcel anthology, and the 4ET1 exam asks you to compare two Part 3 poems. Each poem listed here is from Part 3 as well.
Rudyard Kipling
Piano is the emotional opposite of If-. Where Kipling tells his son to "keep your head" and never "breathe a word about your loss", Lawrence lets his "manhood" be "cast down" and weeps openly. Compare two very different models of masculine emotion.
Christina Rossetti
Both poems centre on the bond between a speaker and a loved person threatened by separation. Lawrence longs to return to a remembered mother; Rossetti asks her beloved to remember her after death. Compare how each handles tenderness, memory and the wish to hold on.
Alice Walker
Both poems are an adult’s memory of a parent. Lawrence is carried back by a song to his mother at the piano; Walker’s speaker, at thirty-nine, misses her father and recalls what he taught her, seeing how much of him lives on in her. Compare how each poet presents memory, longing and the bond between parent and child.
The shape of the whole text, each key moment in turn, and how the people in it connect.
How tension rises and falls. Select a point to open that moment.
Tension is a reading of the text, not a fact about it: use it for the shape, and argue with it.
Moment 1 of 6 · Stanza 1, lines 1-2
In the present, at dusk, a woman sings softly to the speaker, and her song carries him back through the years until a scene from his childhood appears before him.
“Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me”
Who
Why it matters
Sets up the trigger for the whole poem: music opens the past without the speaker choosing to remember.
Select a person to see their relationships. Rings mark who is in the moment above.
The rest of the guide, section by section: analysis, vocabulary and exam practice for this text.
Remember by Christina Rossetti
Paired with Piano on the June 2024 R paper: Lawrence cannot stop remembering the past, while Rossetti’s speaker would rather be forgotten than remembered with sadness.
Half-past Two by U A Fanthorpe
Both poems look back at a moment of childhood, but Fanthorpe’s child briefly escapes time altogether, while Lawrence’s adult is pulled helplessly back into it.
Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
Two rhymed, strongly patterned poems about a parent and overwhelming feeling: Thomas urges his dying father to fight, while Lawrence’s speaker gives up the fight against his own feelings.
If- by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling’s speaker, a father, teaches his son to keep his feelings under control; Piano shows a grown man whose self-control collapses, so the pair opens a debate about what manhood means.