Central Idea and Summary

The central idea of the poem is the transience of human life set against the near-permanence of nature, and the way memory and grief work across generations. A flimsy piece of cardboard — an old photograph — has outlasted the very people smiling in it, and this quiet irony carries the whole poem.

The poet studies a snapshot that shows her mother, then a girl of "some twelve years or so", holding the hands of her two younger cousins, Betty and Dolly, as all three paddle at a beach and smile shyly at the uncle behind the camera. This was long before the poet was born. The sea that washed their "terribly transient feet" has, the poet notes, changed far less than the people have.

Some twenty or thirty years later, the poet's mother would laugh at this same snapshot, teasing herself about how they were "dressed for the beach". For the mother the sea holiday was a lost past; for the poet, that remembered laughter is now itself a lost past. Both are edged with the pain of loss. …