Compare and Contrast Piano and Poem at Thirty

Compare and Contrast Piano and Poem at Thirty-nine Alice Walker’s “Poem at Thirty-Nine” and D.H. Lawrence’s “Piano” are both about nostalgic remembrance and childhood recollections. Lawrence’s “Piano” highlights the persona’s poignancy when thinking of his mother and his happy childhood days and brings out strong feelings of pathos and nostalgia whereas Walker’s “Poem at Thirty-Nine focuses more on the persona reflecting upon her own life and childhood and feeling a sense of happiness in grief as she realizes how much her father has taught her about life. Both poems convey wistful longing for the past and evoke sadness and may make readers think about their relationship with their parents. “Piano” and “Poem at Thirty-Nine” takes a slightly different approach on the theme ‘remembrance’. Lawrence’s “Piano” is more negative and emotional. He uses very strong and emotive language to convey a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality which is shown in his choice of strong diction like “heart” and “weep”. The persona wants to return to the warmth and comfort of his childhood days so much that his heart “weeps to belong” there and a metaphor is used to compare “remembrance” with a “flood” to show that the persona’s tears, emotions and memories are flowing. The mood of the poem is sad and nostalgic. The second poem “Poem at Thirty-nine” however has a relatively positive tone. Though the persona is very sad about losing his father, which is shown in the exclamation “how I miss my father” repeated twice in the poem, her theme of “remembrance” shows her memories of the love and teachings from her father and she is consoled that her father will “admire” the woman she becomes as she starts to see her father’s positive qualities in herself. There is obviously a bright tone in when the persona says “now I look and cook just like him”. The similarity of the persona and her father make readers feel their strong bonding and love. The attitude of the poem is celebrating her father’s existence and her identity. The structures of the poems serve to show the feelings and attitudes of the personas. In “Piano”, the uniform structure of quatrains in three stanzas and the use of dactyls and sometimes spondees could represent security of childhood as well as musical structure. Enjambment makes the memories flow more rapidly, showing that he cannot control his tears and emotion and the use of present tense makes memory seem more immediate. In contrast “Poem at Thirty-nine” is written in free verse as her tone is more conversational. It allows her to express her flow of thoughts freely. Same as “Piano”, Present tense are also used to show that she is thinking about the past at the moment and both the enjambment in the two poems can show the

spontaneous flow of thoughts. Both poems demonstrate the idea of feminist through the use of juxtaposition. In “Poem at thirty nine”, the juxtaposition of ‘woman’ and ‘chopping wood’, show that the persona mirrored her father’s manly qualities and she is proud of it as she thinks that she has strength and is independent. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of “manhood” and “weed” in “Piano” shows that the persona is emotional which should is not expected to be an attribute of man. He is not proud of it like the persona in “Poem at Thirty-nine” and feel shameful as if his“manhood is cast down”.