Piano by D. H. Lawrence and The Piano and the Drums by Gabriel Okara MA Semester 4, Department of English, MKBU.

1. Khushbu Lakhupota
MA Semester 4
Department of English
M. K. Bhavnagar University
Batch 2020-2022
Paper 206 The African Literature
Topic: Comparison of the two Poems
1.Piano by D. H. Lawrence
2.The Piano and The Drums by Gabriel
Okara
2 March 2022, Wednesday
khushbu22jan93@gmail.com

2. D
D. H. Lawrence Gabriel Okara

3. David Herbert Lawrence
Born: September 11, 1885, England.
Died: 2 March 1930, (aged 44)
France
Occupation: Novelist, Poet
Language: English
Genre: Modernism
Notable Works:
Sons and Lovers (1913)
The Rainbow (1915)
Women in Love (1920)
John Thomas and Lady Jane (1927)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
Gabriel Okara
Born: 24 April 1921, Nigeria
Died: 25 March 2019, Nigeria (aged 97)
Occupation: Novelist, Poet
Notable Work: The Voice (1964)
Other works:
The Fisherman’s Invocation (Poems)
(1978)
The Dreamer, His Vision (Poems) (2005)
As I See It (Poems) (2006)
Collected Poems (2016)

4. Poem 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.

5. THE PIANO AND THE
DRUMS
BY GABRIEL OKARA
When at break of day at a riverside
I hear jungle drums telegraphing
the mystic rhythm, urgent, raw
like bleeding flesh, speaking of
primal youth and the beginning,
I see panther snarling about to leap
8 and the hunters crunched with spears
poised;
And my blood ripples, turns torrent,
topple the years and at once I'm
in my mother's laps a suckling;
at once I'm walking simple
paths with no innovations,
rugged, fashioned with the naked
warmth of hurrying feet and groping hearts
16 in green leaves and wild flowers pulsing.

6. Then I hear a wailing piano
Solo speaking of complex ways
in tear-furrowed concerts
on far away lands
and new horizons with
coaxing diminuendo, counterpoint,
crescendo. But lost in the labyrinth of its
complexities,
it ends in the middle
25 of a phrase at a dagger point.
And I lost in the morning mist
of an age at a riverside keep
wandering in the mystic rhythm
29 of jungle drums and the
concerto.

7. Piano by Lawrence
● Nostalgia
● Innocence
● Suffering & longing to go
back to past.
● Relationships
● Conflict between present
experiences & past memories.
● Piano +ve sense
The Piano and Drums
By Gabriel Okara
● Nature
● Childhood Reminiscence &
its Effect.
● The Theme of Culture /Conflict
● Innocence
● Dilemma
● No place like home
● Living a double standard life
● Acculturation
● Piano -ve sense
THEMES

8. Critical Analysis of Piano by D. H. Lawrence
● “Piano” detailed a situation fully sufficient to evoke intense
emotions.
● Lawrence exposes his reader to emotion, awakening in him
resistance and response.
● The speaker of The Piano has a strong memory of his mother’s
singing, & it is nothing but sweet.
● When Lawrence first drafted “Piano” in 1908, his mother was
alive and well, no poem about her could have elegiac force. Six
or seven years later after her death, “Piano” speaks clearly not
only of Lawrence‘s intense tie to his mother, but of the struggle
between son and lover.
● Piano is the only poem in which Sunday parlour is described -
site for the deepest intimacy of his childhood, the source of
passion that could shake him out of himself years after his
mother had died.
● “Piano” is not a cosy poem but crafted to worry readers, placing
us as Lawrence was placed at the fertile heart of discontent.
(Laird)

9. Critical views on The Piano and The Drums.
● Not Piano vs Drums or Piano against Drums.
● The poem speaks to a world in which contrasts co-
exist as distinct but mutual entities increasingly
interdependent; where junctions become
conjunctions.
● A world in which Pianos and Drums find equal
expression, both by symbolism and direction, with a
guiding vision of commonality rather than opposition,
distanciation and conflict.
● The melody of both worlds, threshed in the interest
of a common humanity, is the harmony of this new
age.
(Abaku)

10. Main Poetic Devices in The
Piano and the Drums
1. Imagery
2. Symbolism
3. Personification
4. Alliterations
(Ogweje)
Poetic Devices in The Piano
1. Enjambment
2. Caesura
3. Alliteration

11. There’s nothing remarkable about it. All
one has to do is hit the right keys at
the right time and the instrument plays
itself.
- Johann Sebastian Bach
A woman sings at the piano, and the
poet is carried back to his childhood.
- D. H. Lawrence

13. Thank You