Updike Player Piano

In the poem, “Player Piano”, John Updike demonstrates a lot of feeling and emotion of an unhuman piano. By having detailed imagery of sounds, figures of speech, and rhyme, he portrays the reader into the picture of a machine-like device that has its own natural music language. This 12-line poem recalls the life and achievements of a player piano. In the first and second line, there is a lot of assonance (the repetition of sound in a vowel) and consonance (reassurance of similar sound) that are represented. In line one, the sound of ‘’ick” in the words, “stick”, “click”, and “snicker” demonstrate in the readers mind the type of music it is playing over and over again in a sharp and aggressive way, while hearing the repetition of a clicking …show more content…
The rhyme scheme in the first stanza goes a, b, a, b. In the second stanza it all is the same c, c, c, c. And the third stanza it goes d, e, d, e. The rhythm is constant and has a regular flow, the expression of every note is on tempo and the melody is the same after every line because even though it’s not a human figure playing the instrument it has its own feeling of making the sound through the device. The meter of the poem is describing in a regular tune, that compares in a creative and expressive matter like a human musician would do. It starts with an iamb followed by an anapest. The anapestic meter of the poem gives it a song of quality, as if the reader is actually listening to the player piano. Unlike the first stanza, the last four lines portray the different sounds a piano produce’s. It can either make “jumble of rumbles” or “light like the moon”. Line 9 plays with assonance for the audience to hear, but line 10 includes the hearing of the audience plus visual effects deliberating the imagery of the poem. The tone of the poem comes off very ironic because you get the perspective from the title “Player Piano” that someone would actually play the instrument but in reality it is about a piano playing