Gwendolyn Brooks once said in an interview that she wrote poetry because she liked "working with language, as others like working with paints and clay, or notes."… Her skill in shaping and modulating her words is apparent in one of the finest twentieth-century sonnets, "Piano After War," in which diction, imagery, and the sonnet form are used with consummate craft and artistry.

The octave of the poem depicts in selected detail a piano recital which, for the narrator, revives "Old hungers," that is, memories of similar occasions before the war of the title. The opening lines focus telescopically on the fingers…. The fingers are clever in their ability to "beg glory from the willing keys"; and they are clever, almost as a sorcerer's hands are clever, in their power to cause "Old hungers" to "break their coffins, rise to eat and thank." Both senses contribute to the feeling of a "snug," that is, comfortable, warm, and secure evening. They also help to create the atmosphere of enchantment which almost hypnotizes the narrator so that her hungers merely "eat and thank," are temporarily satisfied, rather than "eat and think," the deliberately unfulfilled expectation aroused by the sonnet rhyme scheme.

The second quatrain continues the suggestion of warmth, comfort, and enchantment. But at the same time that the charming music creates an atmosphere of warmth and comfort and brings back a forgotten past, it suggests to the reader something antithetical to that atmosphere; for as the music suffuses, by a revealing syllepsis, both the room and the narrator "like the golden rose / That sometimes after sunset warms the west," we realize that this mood must be as fleeting as that "rose" color which is born only because of the death of the sun and therefore must soon yield to cold and darkness.

The hint of death in this simile and in the connotation of the words "sunset" and "west" recalls a similar hint in the first quatrain ("coffins"); and the purpose of these suggestions is evident when we see the importance of death in the last six lines. (p. 2)

Here the earlier suggestions of death are hardened into the reality of the "bitter dead men" whose cry echoes in the narrator's mind and supplants the joy and even the sound of the penetrating music. These are the men who have died in the war, who never rise from their coffins to "attend a gentle maker of musical joy."

The final couplet again demonstrates a mastery of the sonnet form. It sums up perfectly the movement of the poem, and it is not at all divorced from the first twelve lines. The metaphoric warmth of the octave had "thawed" the vision made cold by sights of war…. And the comfort and false security represented by the "softness" of the final line is disrupted by the hard realities of the bitter cry, in conjunction with which the enchanting, but illusory, musical joy cannot exist.

The craft and artistry of this poem are evident not only in the handling of the sonnet form, the diction, and the imagery, but also in the use of slant rhyme throughout. We have already seen one case where the unfulfilled expectation of the exact rhyme is significant. This is also true in the final couplet where the proximity of the imperfectly rhyming "ice" and "face" is jarring and reflects the hardness that has returned. Indeed, throughout the sonnet the fact that there is something wrong with the music of the rhyme reflects the flaw in the music heard by the narrator, a music which symbolizes the narrator's innocence and which, because of the harsh experience of war and death, can never again represent the reality of the narrator's world. (pp. 2-3)