Piano

• Poem "Piano"

  • Highlights key language and literary devices used
  • Explains how to analyze the poem
• Softly in the dusk

  Something is shifting slowly
• Pathetic fallacy is used to show the dark transient space between night and day
• Poem is written in first person narrative
• Rhyme scheme


  • Regular, predictable a a b b pattern
  • Shows nostalgia coming in waves, familiar route
• Narrator reflects on past but doesn't recognize their younger self
• Onomatopoeia used to highlight the power of music triggering nostalgia
• Sibilance is soft and comforting, showing the speaker's yearning for past comfort
• Caesura is the volta, turning point where nostalgia overcomes the speaker's attempts to repress it
• Insidious mastery of song


  Power of music to trigger vivid memories the speaker doesn't want to consider
• Personification of the speaker's heart shows intensity of nostalgia
• Domestic language used to show speaker's yearning for comfort and routine of the past
• Onomatopoeia and personification of music show its powerful effect on the narrator
• Shift in speaker's feelings, anger at how music has forced them to remember repressed memories
• Diminutive description of "childish days" shows speaker's attempt to downplay nostalgia
• Alliteration of "me" and "manhood" brings speaker back to present, trying to repress nostalgia
• Flood of remembrance


  Metaphor for the strength and vividness of nostalgia
• Simile of weeping "like a child" shows speaker's intense longing for childhood innocence and freedom