Poetry in Prose

How poets can inspire novelists

I would feel very ill equipped to write about the skills required in writing poetry, although I do have a talented poet friend who has agreed to write a blog on this subject soon.

 I have written a few (probably very bad) poems myself and as an English teacher I teach a couple of poetry modules. Over Christmas, I have just been marking an assignment where students compile their own poetry anthology, commenting on the reasons for their choice.  One poem in particular stood out for me: ‘Piano’ By D. H Lawrence. I remember teaching this to a G.C.S.E student and thinking how well it fitted with a novel I was writing. So after the lesson, I looked at the poem again. Here it is in its entirety:

Piano
By D.H. Lawrence 

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.

I was particularly taken with the child sitting under the piano, ‘pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.’

In my second novel, ‘The Child on Platform One,’ I have a child who is a musical prodigy and the daughter of a pianist. I imagined that she too might sit under the piano, pressing her mother’s feet. This is how the image from the poem found its way into my book:

When Miriam was a toddler, she loved to creep under Eva’s piano whilst she played. Sometimes, when Eva reached out a foot to press the sostenuto pedal, she would feel Miriam’s little hand stroking her shoe and hear the tiny gusts of breath she made when deep in concentration. At other times, the child would pull herself up and stand holding onto Eva’s legs, her face buried in her lap. And then she would play as gently as possible so as not to disturb her.

I hope D.H. Lawrence will forgive me!