CHILDHOOD MEMORY AND EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN D. H. LAWRENCE’S “PIANO”: A COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

In this article, I provide a cognitive-psychological reading of D. H. Lawrence's lyric poem “Piano” [1] as a dramatization of the interaction among memory, emotion, and sensory perception. The article draws on Bartlett's reconstructive theory of memory [2] and Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's model of the self-memory system [3] to argue that the poem's central event   an involuntary return by the adult listener to a scene from childhood   closely enacts processes that have been independently described by cognitive psychology since: the triggering of involuntary autobiographical memory by an external sensory cue [4]; the integration of music and personal memory within self-referential neural processing [5]; and the bittersweet, dual-valanced character of nostalgic affect [6]. Drawing on close reading and cognitive poetics [7,8], the analysis traces how Lawrence's imagery, diction, and shifting grammatical person stage the speaker's gradual surrender from adult composure to childhood vulnerability. The article demonstrates that memory in “Piano” operates as a two-edged sword, at once comforting and grief-inducing, a duality that closely resembles what psychologists call the bittersweet structure of nostalgia. The study concludes that lyric poems, though brief, can give voice to the architecture of involuntary memory and emotional regression with a precision that supplements, and in some ways anticipates, empirical cognitive research, and that “Piano” is a particularly economical case study for cognitive literary criticism.