D. H. LAWRENCE The Piano1 Somewhere beneath that piano's superb sleek 1 Must hide my mother's piano, little and bpe^n, with the back
stood close to
That Mwr ngpinrt the wall, an^^fne front's faded silk, both torn And the keys with little h^Hows, that my mother's fingers hd wji
Softly, in the shrfdoite, a woma n is singing to me Quietly, through the y^ars I have crept back to see A child sitting under thiNoiano, in the boom of the
shakmg^mgkng string
1. Transcribed from a notebook in which Law-remaining three stanzas, sometimes radically; and rence at first entered various academic assign-most surprisingly, reversed his original conclusion. ments while he was a student at the University As Lawrence explained, some of his early poems College of Nottingham, 1906-8, but then used to 'had to be altered, where sometimes the hand of write drafts of some of his early poems. These were commonplace youth had been laid on the mouth probably composed in the period from 1906 to of the demon. It is not for technique that these 1910. The text reproduced here was revised and poems are altered: it is to say the real say.' published with the title 'Piano' in Lawrence's New For transcriptions and discussions of this and Poems, 1918. A comparison of this draft with other poems in Lawrence's early notebook, see 'Piano,' reprinted above, will show that Lawrence Vivian de Sola Pinto, 'D. H. Lawrence: Letter- eliminated the first and fourth stanzas (as well as Writer and Craftsman in Verse,' in Renaissance the last two lines of the third stanza); revised the and Modem Studies 1 (1957): 5-34.
.
A24 / POEMS IN PROCESS
Pressing the littleois^ feet of the mother who smiles as^lfesings
The full throated woma^^ias chosen a winning, living2 sonjNs^
And surely the heart that is in mbspust belong
To the old Sunday evenings, when aJhd^iess wandered outside And hymns gleamed on our warm lips, as we watched mother's fingers glide
is
Oi^thisrny sister at home in the old front room Singing love's first surprised gladness, alone in the gloom. She will start when she sees me, and blushing, spread out her haorfs T o cover m y mouth's raillery, tJnl I'm bound in
heart-spun
her shame's pleading hands.
A womaiSi singing me a wijd'nungarian airS. y ' And her arms^Suid het?osom and the whole of her soulu^are An d the great bla^Npiano is clamouring as my mother's na^er could clamour
my mothers [ ]3 tukes are
IK
And thn tnnric of the ptitrW de devoured of this music's
vaging glamour.
2. A conjectural reading; the word is not clearly 3. An undecipherable word is crossed out here. legible.
.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER / A73
fares, 1977, provides a reception history and
contemporary reviews. Jeffares's A Ne w Com
mentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, rev. ed.
1984, and A Commentary on the Plays ofW. B. Yeats, 1975, are indispensable references. Also valuable are Sa m McCready's A William Butler Yeats Encyclopedia, 1997, and Lester I. Conner's A Yeats Dictionary, 1998.
In the vast body of Yeats criticism, some important studies are Richard Ellmann's Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, and The Identity of Yeats, 2n d ed. 1964; Thoma s Parkinson's
W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic: A Study of his Early Verse, 1951, rpt. 1971 with The Later Poetry and a new foreword; Frank Kermode's Romantic Image, 1957; Jon Stallworthy's Between the Lines: W. B. Yeats's Poetry in the Making, 1963; Helen Vendler's Yeats's Vision and Later Plays, 1963; Thomas R. Whitaker's Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History, 1964; Harold Bloom's Yeats, 1970; Bornstein's Yeats and Shelley, 1970; Donoghue's William Butler Yeats, 1971; Mary Helen Thuente's W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 1981; Elizabeth Butler Cullingford's Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, 1981; Loizeaux's Yeats and the Visual Arts, 1986; Paul Scott Stanfield's Yeats and Politics in the 1930s, 1988; Finneran's Editing Yeats's Poems, 1990; Stan Smith's W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction, 1990; Jahan Ramazani's Yeats and the Poetr)' of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime, 1990; Hazard Adams's The Book of Yeats's Poems, 1991; Michael North's The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, 1991; Cullingford's Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry, 1993; M . L. Rosenthal's Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art, 1994; Maijorie Howes's Yeats's Natiotis: Gender, Class, and Irishness, 1996; Michael J. Sidnell's Yeats's Poetry and Poetics, 1996; Vicki Mahaffey's States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment, 1998; Bornstein's Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, 2001; Gregory Castle's Modernism and the Celtic Revival, 2001; and Richard Greaves's Transition, Reception, and Modernism in W. B. Yeats, 2002. Collections of essays include William Butler Yeats, ed. Bloom, 1986; Yeats's Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison, 1996; and W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments, ed. David Pierce, 2000. Man y essays
have appeared annually in the journals Yeats and Yeats Annual.
.
Literary Terminology*
