"Piano" Analysis

The speaker in the poem "Piano" is a man who is remembering his childhood. The reader knows this because he says, "Of childish days upon me, my manhood is cast" (Lawrence 11). In the beginning of the poem, words like softly, dusk, sitting, tingling, and poised have a calm and bland connotation. In the second stanza, words like insidious, betrays, and weeps have negative connotations, almost opposite to those of the first stanza. The third stanza uses words with negative connotations as well like vain, clamour, apassionato, cast down, flood, and weep. The speaker describes his memories as "the flood of remembrance" (12), and a flood is usually a bad thing. When a house floods, many problems occur because the family must pay for the repairs and damage that the water did, especially to the basements of most houses. Weep also has to do with excessive amounts of water because when one weeps, he is letting out a lot of tears at once, just like a flood is bringing an excessive amount of rain at once.
The speaker creates an image of a woman singing to him "Softly, in the dusk" (1). This image sparks his memory because he then goes on describing the image of "A child sitting under the piano" (3). A mother is smiling at the child as she sings to him. This part of the poem is calm and happy. Then the speaker says "the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home" (6-7). This changes the mood of the poem to sad because instead of feeling joy from his happy memories, the speaker cries because he misses those wonderful times, the calm Sunday nights at home that he describes in the first stanza. He goes on to describe the image of "winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide" (7-8). This image causes him to cry because these memories were his childhood and now he is taken back to those special days, only now it is a woman, not his mother, singing to him. First her voice was soft, but by the end of the poem, "the singer to burst into clamour" (9). The singer's voice is loud, and the speaker is weeping.
The change in mood of the poem can easily be identified through the images and diction that the speaker uses. This contributes to the meaning of the poem because it shows how important one's childhood memories can be to him. He grows up but will never forget the simple reoccurances like his mother singing to him. His memories will forever stay in his heart because at inside, he is still that little boy as "childish days (are) upon me, my manhood is cast Down" (11-12). The speaker remembers his childhood and knows that he is grown up now, and can no longer act like that child. However, as he thinks about those fond memories, he can't help but mourn that they are over.