A Photograph

In 'A Photograph', the poet Shirley Toulson looks at an old photograph of her mother. The 'cardboard' (the photograph mounted on card) shows a day at the seaside. Her mother, about twelve years old, is the 'big girl', going paddling with her two cousins, Betty and Dolly, who each hold one of her hands. All three stand still to smile through their hair at the uncle holding the camera. The poet sees her mother's 'sweet face', from a time before she was born.

The poem moves through three phases of time:

• The photograph: the mother as a happy girl at the beach.
• Twenty or thirty years later: the mother, now grown up, would look at the snapshot and laugh, saying, 'See Betty and Dolly, look how they dressed us for the beach.'
• Now: the mother has died.

The sea, the poet notes, has hardly changed. It 'washed their terribly transient feet'. 'Transient' means lasting only a short time. The lasting sea is set against short human life: the sea is still the same, but the girls who paddled in it have grown old and gone.

The seaside holiday was the mother's past; the mother's laughter as she remembered it is now the poet's past. Both memories are bitter-sweet, and both are borne 'with the laboured ease of loss': calm on the surface, but painful underneath.

Now the mother has been dead for nearly as many years as the girl in the photograph had lived. About this, the poet says, there is nothing to say at all: 'Its silence silences.' The grief is too deep for words.