Literary Journal #9 - "Piano" by D. H. Lawrence: Can You Repeat the Past?

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.

    One of the most famous works done by D. H. Lawrence, the poem Piano is a masterwork of English Literature. While the theme of the poem, nostalgia, can be considered a cliché, shows Lawrence's unique way of writing and delivering emotions. Not only nostalgia for him is a mere sentimental attachment to the past, but also is an inevitable human condition which is triggered by "an insidious mastery of song" that instigates a battle in his heart.* And finally the soft song of the woman completely destroys the "manhood" of the narrator and "betrays" him. The barriers between past and present collapse, but the narrator comes to his realization that there already has been a huge time gap between the past and the present that he cannot cross. Perhaps the reason he weeps is not because he misses his past, but because he notices the lack of his ability to go back to the past. This makes me recall a famous quote in F. S. Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby.

"You can't repeat the past? ... Of course you can."

    Can you really repeat the past?

    Perhaps you might create the exactly same situation or setting of the past in present. But are the emotions result from it will have same or equivalent degree of value it had in the past? Everyone, at least once in a while, wishes that they could go back good old days. But when you think about what you felt in those "good" and "old" days, you weren't perhaps appreciating the days you were living as much as you would have done now. It seems a little ironic that people, who in these days fast forward five minute commercials on TV and pick up their foods at drive-thru windows, want to rewind their lives occasionally.

*Camacho, Amaranta O. "THE IMAGE OF NOSTALGIA IN “PIANO”, A POEM BY D.H. LAWRENCE." (2012)