POETRY ANALYSIS Page1

A Photograph by Shirley Toulson

What’s the point of taking photographs? 

Well, the most obvious answer is for preserving a good memory. Well, yes! But its a lot more than just preserving a memory. It says a lot! It talks about the time, the emotion attached to a particular place or person. It tells that you want yourself to be reminded of the memory even if your real memory has withered it from its database.

This poem has a very emotional backdrop whereby, a daughter, a grown-up lady finds an old cardboard-displayed photograph of her mother’s childhood. The photograph showed the mother,then a girl of around twelve, holding hands with her two cousins,Betty and Dolly on her either side at the beach.

While holding the snapshot in her hand, the narrator remembers her mother looking at this picture years ago and laughing at it as she remembered the day they had gone to the beach for paddling with her cousins and the wind was making their hair wild, which is also evident in the image-

“smile through their hair”.

The picture was taken by one of the uncles.

In the first paragraph, we find the narrator describing the photograph in the first six lines and getting emotional as she calls the face of her mother in the snapshot as ‘sweet’. The mention that the face was sweet then- “that was before I was born” emphasizes that after she was born, the mother’s face was not as sweet as it was before. We find a comparison which gives us a glimpse of the harsh realities of life. This line depicts that with the process of growing up into a responsible lady and a mother, the innocent smile had changed. Also the picture’s sweet face represents a carefree childhood while the comparison generalised the impact on a person’s life that the arrival of responsibilities and stress  takes away the carefreeness and thus ‘the sweet smile’.

The last two lines of the first paragraph-

“And the sea,which appears to have changed less,

Washed their terribly transient feet.”

have a deeper meaning. Here, the sea represents nature. Nature as the immortal, intransient and ever-existing power.Therefore, the sea in the photograph looks almost the same even now,crossing two different timelines of the mother’s childhood and the narrator’s childhood; while there is a stark difference of situation for the people posing in the same photograph.The “terribly transient feet” displays the use of transferred epithet whereby the ‘transient feet’ is terrible considering the situation that nature has made its elements like the sea everlasting and unchanged while man is helpless in the face of the invincible Time.Moreover,  “transient feet” uses synecdoche whereby it symbolizes, not only the ‘feet’ , but the whole person. The poet means to present that human life is transient, short-lived and inevitably closer to death and decay.

 Therefore, the poet clearly draws a parallel comparison between the short-lived life of a human and the intransient existence of Nature presented by the sea.  A similar kind of comparison is found in the refrain of the poem, THE BROOK by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:-

“For men may come and men may go

But I go on forever.”

The change of the poet’s emotions in the first paragraph is very naturally presented as she looks into a picture, remembers the details of the day as she was told by her mother, the connection of the picture to her mother reminds her of her memory of her mother and finally becoming philosophical, talking about man’s and nature’s existence. Throughout the poem, we find the poet going back and forth in three different timelines- her mother’s childhood, her own childhood/the time she spent with her mother and finally the present moment.

The paragraph is changed as the narrator gets back to the photograph she was holding and this time she talks about what her mother used to say regarding the particular day,the photograph was taken. The mother was a matured, middle-aged lady in her thirties or forties when she described this picture to her daughter, i.e., our narrator. Naturally, she became nostalgic as well as a bit caught up in the past memories with a tiny pinch of embarrassement, as she laughs it off saying how they were dressed-up. They must have been wearing some kind of swim-wear considering they were young girls going for paddling in the beach. This moment is actually a light-hearted moment ( consider a photograph of your “simple-dressing” mother or aunt dressed as old actresses or following the old-school fashion. Definately, worth a mile long grin !!!)

The narrator,with a helpless sigh talks about her mother’s laughter, which has now become a part of her past life. The lost things, i.e., the mother had lost her innocence depicted in the snapshot and the narrator had lost the sound of her mother’s laughter. Both are so long in the past that they have dried in the memory somewhere and it almost needs a voluntary effort to remember that glorious past and compare it with the gloomy present.

Finally, the last paragraph reveals the reason of the emotional turmoil in the first two paragraphs. The mother,whose childhood picture the narrator is holding has been dead for nearly twelve years. It is obvious that the picture acts as a time-machine taking the narrator back to the glorious times with the glorious memories. She remembers her mother and feels the void of her absence. Though she had adjusted to her present circumstances,but the photograph pulled her back to an emotional journey in her childhood as well as her mother’s.

Therefore, she once again accepts the present scenario as she realizes the reality and ends the poem with the beautiful use of pun over the word “silence”. It depicts how even the silence( which is personified in the first use as a noun) around the narrator due to the absence of the mother’s voice and laughter has become silent(used as a verb). In other words, the silence due to the death of the mother earlier used to make its presence felt by the vacancy or absence, but now even that absence is less evident and perishing from the narrator’s life.

The last line depicts how people, whose presence was once intertwined with our life and definitely hold a special place in the heart eventually leave. When that happens, we feel their void,their emptiness,their vacancy in our life,in our heart; but even that emptiness loses its identity as time heals and fills that void. Its the harsh reality of human life that as much as we want to be immortal, death is eventually filled and forgotten in the daily struggle of life and new memories. The poem also presents the significance of a photograph in human life that though one might forget the void and gap, but one snapshot is enough to bring back the whole scenario, restoring it in memory with all its glory. They are like tickets to our memorable days, whereby looking at them can take us to the virtual reality of a movie of our past life with its sweet memories.

I hope you enjoy the poem with all its magnanimity and bring out your old snapshots, sit back and enjoy the journey to the glorious past looking at them. You may tell me what you wanna read in the comments section for the next post. Happy Reading!!!