Summary
"Musician" conveys the speaker's impressions of her son learning how to play the piano. The poem begins with a description of the boy's room. The carpets resemble a Jackson Pollock painting due to the scattered clothes, books, instruments, and magazines. The boy spent the entire day strumming an unspecified instrument and studying Beethoven Sonatas. He can hear the music "like words" (4).
The speaker recounts a particular winter as being bitterly cold. That winter, the speaker's son begins learning the piano. His obsession prevents him from sleeping, and he plays Bartok (the Hungarian composer and pianist) until the early hours of the morning. Snow falls in an endless veil, obscuring the parked car outside in the driveway. The speaker sleeps beneath two heavy duvets and her grandmother's fur. She wakes sweltering in the beautiful night to hear her son still playing the Hungarian Dances on the piano while everyone else sleeps.
The speaker feels cut off from the street because of the snow, though this is not a bad thing. Everything is immaculate and glacial. All the houses in the suburbs are encased in this silent white snow. When dawn breaks, the speaker still hears her son playing Debussy. She finds him sleepless, playing the piano, with fingerless gloves to protect against the cold. The snow piles up to magnificent heights outside, burying scent, sound, color, and detritus.
In the speaker's dream, she imagines the snow giving her house a holy quality, like the atmosphere at a cathedral. She wakes to the piano's soft chiming, and snow gently falls from the roof.
Analysis
"Musician" was originally published in Clarke's 1993 collection The King of Britain's Daughter. In general, one should not conflate a poem's speaker with its author. However, Clarke writes on her personal website that "Musician" is a tribute to her eldest son, Owain, a multi-instrumentalist and musician. Beneath the title, Clarke includes in italics "for Owain," reinforcing this personal association. The poem takes place over the course of a snowy winter during which Owain learns to play the piano. The speaker sleeps and wakes to the sound of her son playing the piano, and both the music and the snow make their way into the speaker's dreams.
The poem begins with a comparison between "his carpet" and a Jackson Pollock painting, with "him" referring to Owain (1). Clarke drops several artistic and musical references such as in this simile by either mentioning an artist's name or a specific song title. These require a foundation of knowledge or further research on the part of the reader. Clarke does not work to explain any of these references more than is necessary, which contributes to the poem's quiet and calm tone.
The unusual grammar and use of a list form in the opening lines paint a picture of Owain's total absorption in his music and lack of attention towards anything else. Though the word "splattered" could be read as either an adjective or a verb, it is most likely an adjective. This means that the action taking place in this first sentence does not occur until after the list of items strewn over the carpet is written out. Amongst this mess of clothes, books, instruments, and the NME (short for New Musical Express: a UK indie and pop music magazine), Owain "[strums]" the day away and reads Beethoven sonatas (3).
Clarke blurs the boundaries between senses and artistic forms in this poem through auditory imagery. Owain claims he can hear Beethoven sonatas "like words" in the first stanza (4). And although this free verse poem does not follow a set meter, it conveys a sense of musicality using alliteration. One example is when the speaker describes how the suburbs are "hushed in wafery whiteness," echoing the sound of snow (12).
The speaker uses the past tense to describe "that bitterest winter" when Owain learned to play the piano (5). She then juxtaposes the bitter cold with a sense of wonder and musicality, which become qualities of the snow itself. This can be seen in descriptions such as "the luminous nights," "moonlit snow," and "immaculate," (9, 10, and 11). Although the snow falls high enough to obscure the family's car in the driveway, Clarke writes about it with reverence. The speaker repeatedly invokes the word "veil" to describe snowfall (7 and 17). Veils are a type of hanging cloth used to cover a person or holy object, and they often have religious significance. Snow obscures the landscape much the way a veil hides something. In the poem, "Scent, sound, colour, detritus lay buried" beneath the snow, but the connotation is not grim or distressing (18). Rather, Clarke expresses a feeling of quiet awe.
Religious imagery permeates the poem. The speaker dreams of her house as a metaphorical "drowned cathedral," in other words a holy place of worship (20). The combination of music and snow generates this sense of holiness. Snow provides a holy structure for the house, making it "vaulted and pillared" (21). Because music plays an integral role in many religious traditions, Clarke construes Owen's piano-playing as a sacred sound. The speaker wakes to "hear the piano's muffled bells, / a first pianissimo slip of snow from the roof" in the poem's final lines (23-24). The soft /l/ alliteration in "muffled bells" provides a liquid sound that creates an introspective mood. The sibilance in "pianissimo slip of snow" mimics the very sound that the snow would make. In music, a pianissimo is a dynamic marking in music to indicate that a passage should be played or sung with an extremely soft volume or intensity.
The snow's subtle movement at the end of the poem materializes the part of the speaker's dream where she perceives her house to be "a drowned cathedral, waiting for the thaw" (20). Because this particular winter is described earlier as bitterly cold, the "thaw" could signal that the cold is beginning to abate. Here, the speaker combines the sound of Owain playing the piano with the natural phenomenon of snow.
