D.H. Lawrence "Piano"
...riencing the "vista of years" past and is in a different place and time, so to speak. But, also, the singer now appears to him showy and shallow compared to his mother's genuine passion. He remembers himself “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.” This line from the first stanza may suggest that he actually felt more secure then, in his childhood, hiding under the piano and feeling comfortable being next to his mother’s allegorically described “small” but “poised” feet, than now, in his manhood, being, most probably, alone and uncertain of his future. Even though the line from the second stanza “the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside and hymns in the cosy parlour” may refer to the biting contrast between the harsh reality of the narrator’s childhood time, depicted as “winter outside,” and the secure, friendly atmosphere of his domestic surroundings, pictured as “hymns in the cosy parlour,” he still weeps “like a child for the past.” While the narrator endures a kind of regression from manhood back to his childhood, there may be a sexual pun in the line from the third stanza "my manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance," for he weeps for his mother rather than being excited by the passionate singer. There is a possibility that D. H. Lawrence intended a play on the word "vain" from the first line of the third stanza “so now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour,” meaning "in vain," or ineffectual and futile, and "vain" as it relates to "vanity," which describes the state of being proud and conceited. The “vista of years” greatly amplifies the detailed perception of the time past. Instead of saying “taking me back to the past” the narrator chooses the word “vista”, which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means “a distant view through or along an avenue or opening,” or “an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events).” “In spite of my...