Like ‘Call into Death’, ‘Piano’ was inspired by the loss of Lawrence’s beloved mother, Lydia. This beautiful poem consists of three quatrains with two couplets per quatrain. This makes the poem acoustically pleasing, which is appropriate, given the title and the theme.
Music can have an amazingly powerful effect on us. A song can bring you back to a certain time in your life; it can evoke people and places vividly. A soundtrack, for example, can bring a film to life, it can stir your emotions, and it can even scare you. Music is constantly accessible to us now. We can store thousands of songs on our phone, we can go to concerts where large numbers of people can all listen to the same band. In Lawrence’s day, people loved music just as much as they do now, but it was not nearly as accessible. It was a real luxury to own an instrument, especially an expensive one like a piano, and an even greater luxury to have someone in the home who could play it well. Lawrence’s mother was an accomplished pianist and singer, and he loved to listen to her play and sing. As a small child he would sit under the piano to help his mother to press the pedals. From there he could see the inner workings of the piano, the strings and levers being struck. In Lawrence’s mind, the sound of a piano being played became inextricably linked with his mother.
