Notes on Musician – The Poem is not on the website.
Owain is the older of my two sons. He is a talented musician. He was a self-taught guitarist, and played several other instruments, when he took a year off between school and university. He began piano lessons, and passed Grade 8 that year. The first two lines describe his typical teenage room, ‘splattered’ (metaphor) with dropped clothes, ‘like a Jackson Pollock’ (simile) and the NME, a music magazine. It was a famously snowy winter. Like many teenagers, he went to bed very late, and slept in half the next day. I lay listening to the piano played in the next room while the snow fell deeper and deeper. The piano music and the snow, the sound and the silence. Debussy composed a famous piece for piano called ‘La Cathedrale Engloutie’, ‘The Drowned Cathedral. The final line uses a musical term to describe a sound of snow slipping off the roof.