Shirley Toulson's short poem meditates on time, memory and loss through an old seaside photograph. In the first phase, a cardboard snapshot shows the poet's mother as a girl of about twelve, paddling at the beach holding the hands of her two younger cousins, Betty and Dolly, all three smiling through their wind-blown hair at the uncle behind the camera. The poet notes that the sea, washing their "terribly transient feet," appears to have changed far less than the human lives it touched. In the second phase, the poet recalls how her mother, twenty or thirty years later, would laugh at the snapshot and recall how they were dressed for the beach — the sea holiday being the mother's past, and her laughter the poet's own remembered past, both tinged with the wry ache of loss. In the final, brief phase, the poet observes that her mother has now been dead for nearly as many years as the girl in the photograph had then lived. Facing this circumstance, the poet finds there is "nothing to say at all"; its silence overwhelms speech. The poem thus moves through three stages — the photographed childhood, the mother's remembering laughter, and the poet's present grief — to dwell on the permanence of nature against the impermanence of human life.
A Photograph
Characters & key ideas
CCardboardthe stiff mount of the old photograph; the word stresses the snapshot as a fragile physical object.
TTransientlasting only briefly; the children's feet are "terribly transient" against the enduring sea.
PPaddlingwading in shallow sea water, the childhood act captured in the photograph.
WWrybitterly or ironically twisted; the laughter is "wry with the laboured ease of loss."
NNostalgiathe bittersweet recollection of an irretrievable past that pervades the poem.
TThree phasesthe photographed childhood, the mother's later laughter, and the poet's present grief.
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