on the nature of daylight piano pdf download

The poet remembers the beauty in the past memories not the tale, but his father’s calming voice.

And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head. The memories of the speaker of this poem, unlike the ones of the speaker of The Piano, strengthen his hold on his present and help him forge a beautiful and loving bond with his wife: I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer.

It contrast to this, The Gift explores memory as a boon and defines what the speaker’s past has had to offer him.The speaker expresses that he feels that he has grown in experience due to the lessons taught by his father that have been preserved in his memory. It is no suprise that the nostalgia which grips the speaker comes with a sense of bitterness over having lost that past. It is interesting that while the woman in the present sings softly to him, the sound from the past is that of a boom, indicating that his past is a very potent force in that moment. Just as dusk connects day and night, it may also been seen as a connecting force between past and present. This could be an analogy for the state of the speaker’s mind which wavers between the past and the present, belonging completely to neither. Dusk marks the end of daylight and the beginning of night. The use of the work “dusk” is very significant. In these lines of the poem, the speaker is taken back into his past as a woman softly sings to him. 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. These memories inevitably make him long for his childhood and struggle with his present as he is unablle to uphold his manhood and weeps like a child. The experience of the speaker of the poem is bittersweet as he is betrayed back into his past and forced to confront his memories. The Piano explores the experience of a man who is resisting nostalgia because he knows that his dialogue with the past would weaken him emotionally and make him lose his grip on the present. The poem The Piano has a melancholic tone, and it is abundantly clear that the poet wishes to deny himself the misery that comes with revisiting the past. The tone of the speakers of both the poems is heavily laced with nostalgia, but this nostalgia affects them in very distinct and contrasting ways. In this poem, the sound of the piano “betrays” the speaker back into the past, an he is forced to revisit a part of his life he had so far buried in his mind. This nostalgia, however, may bring joy as well as suffering in the mind of a person.

Lawrence talks about how memory brings with it an uncontrollable sense of nostalgia. These two poems essentially explore both the facets of memory and delineate memory as a potent force in life. These two poems show that memory plays a complex role in the journey of life and that it often poses a dichotomy, acting as a boon as well as bane at the same time. A similar idea is explored in The Gift by Li Young Lee. One of the most potent works by the writer D.H Lawrence is The Piano, a poem that explores the role of memory in life.

On the nature of daylight piano pdf download