Lawrence's poem is a study of how music unlocks memory, and of a man's resistance to, and surrender to, nostalgia.
Piano by D. H. Lawrence appears in the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Anthology (Part 3), studied for IGCSE and International GCSE Literature (Pearson Edexcel 4ET1). Your school confirms the anthology selection, and the board's current syllabus lists it for your exam year.
What the poem is about
A woman sings to him softly in the evening. The adult speaker is drawn back, against his will, to a childhood memory. He sees himself as a small boy beneath the piano while his mother played and sang on Sunday evenings at home.
He tries to resist the pull of the past, aware that the present singer deserves his attention, but the "insidious mastery of song" overwhelms him. By the close his adult composure collapses and he weeps like a child for a time and a home that are gone. Lawrence captures the double movement of nostalgia, its sweetness and its grief, and the helplessness of a grown man mastered by feeling.
Themes and ideas
The pull of the past
The poem enacts the way a single sound can dissolve the present and return us to childhood. Lawrence presents nostalgia as involuntary and almost physical: the memory rises unbidden and carries the speaker off. Its power is bittersweet, the remembered warmth precious precisely because it can never be regained.
Song as key
Music is the poem's engine: a woman's singing in the present unlocks the remembered sound of the mother's piano. Lawrence treats song as something with mastery over the will, able to override adult reason. The verse itself becomes musical, so that the reader is swept along by sound much as the speaker is.
Childhood and home
The core memory is domestic and tender, a child pressed close to a mother's playing in the safety of a Sunday-evening home. This lost world of warmth and belonging is what the speaker grieves. The poem sets the comfort of childhood against the exposure of adult feeling.
Composure undone
Lawrence dramatises a conflict between adult self-control and the flood of feeling that memory releases. The speaker resists, conscious of his dignity, but is finally overcome and weeps openly. The poem is honest about how thin the crust of grown-up composure can be over childhood longing.
Form, structure and sound
The poem falls into three quatrains rhymed in couplets, a tight, song-like frame that suits a poem about music. Lawrence's long, rolling lines carry a swaying, almost hypnotic rhythm that imitates the movement of song and the surge of memory, and heavy enjambment lets feeling spill across the line-endings. Rich sound-effects, the booming and tingling of the remembered piano strings, make the reader hear what the speaker hears.
As a public-domain poem it can be quoted briefly, but a short phrase such as the "insidious mastery of song" is enough. The structure moves from present, to memory, to the final collapse into tears.
Studying Piano by D. H. Lawrence? The paid trial lesson can start with the poem itself and one exam-style question.
How to write about it
Track the poem's movement from the present-day singer, back into childhood memory, and forward to the speaker's tears, and show how sound and rhythm carry that surge of nostalgia. You may quote a short phrase, but keep quotations brief and always explain their effect rather than letting them stand alone. For comparison, place it beside another poem of memory or family.
Build each paragraph around a shared idea, such as how each poet treats the past, or resists and yields to feeling. Do not write about the two poems in turn.
A useful comparison for an anthology question is Poem at Thirty-Nine, because the two poems share enough ground to compare. Our guide to comparing two poems shows how.
An exam-style question to practise
How does Lawrence present the power of memory in 'Piano'?
Plan your answer in five minutes before you write. Choose three points from the themes and form notes above. Then check your plan against the mark scheme section below.
More question angles
- Explore how Lawrence uses sound and rhythm to convey the pull of the past.
- How does the poet present the conflict between adult composure and childhood feeling in 'Piano'?
How this maps to the mark scheme
Examiners mark poetry answers against assessment objectives. These are the skills the paper rewards. For Pearson Edexcel 4ET1, the objectives are summarised on our qualification page.
- AO1: Demonstrate a close knowledge and understanding of texts, maintaining a critical style and presenting an informed personal engagement
- AO2: Analyse the language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects
- AO3: Explore links and connections between texts
- AO4: Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written
For Piano, build your reading around “The pull of the past” and “Song as key”, and support each point with a short quotation. Then explain how the form, structure and sound in the section above create that meaning.
Where a question asks you to link poems, compare Piano with Poem at Thirty-Nine. Keep any context about D. H. Lawrence brief and tied to the words on the page.
Read the poem alongside these notes. This page is our own analysis and original teaching material. Where we quote this public-domain poem, it is a short, attributed phrase.
Where to go next
Practise the method on an unseen poem with our guide to reading an unseen poem, then see a worked answer in our comparing poems model response. Browse more anthology poems or read about Literature in English tuition.
When you have written an answer on Piano, a paid one-hour trial lesson lets the teacher who would continue mark it with you.