Personal Choice 5

Piano

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.

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was an English writer, novelist, poet and essayist. His works reflect on modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. His best-known novels - Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover - notably concerned gay and lesbian relationships, and were the subject of censorship trials. Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him many enemies, and he endured persecution and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile, four years of which he described as a ‘savage enough pilgrimage’. At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. However, English novelist and critic E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.’ Later, English literary critic F. R. Leavis also championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness.

What a wonderful evocation of childhood and the past as another country that cannot come again, nor can we go back to. Lawrence was a better novelist than a poet, this one though to my mind slips through to greatness.