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...