What is the irony in the poem "A PHOTOGRAPH" ?
Answers
Explanation:
In the poem, " the photograph" the poet Shirley Toulson explains the memory of her mother. She describes multiple activities that she sees in the picture which she saw of her mother. She saw that her mother was at the sea with her cousins.
There is one line which is present in the last stanza of the poem, which showcases irony.
that line is highlighted in bold, in the following poem:-
The cardboard shows me how it was
When the two girl cousins went paddling
Each one holding one of my mother’s hands,
And she the big girl - some twelve years or so.
All three stood still to smile through their hair
At the uncle with the camera, A sweet face
My mother’s, that was before I was born
And the sea, which appears to have changed less
Washed their terribly transient feet.
Some twenty- thirty- years later
She’d laugh at the snapshot. “See Betty
And Dolly," she’d say, “and look how they
Dressed us for the beach." The sea holiday
was her past, mine is her laughter. Both wry
With the laboured ease of loss
Now she’s has been dead nearly as many years
As that girl lived. And of this circumstance
There is nothing to say at all,
Its silence silences.
The above mentioned bold lines can tell how the poets mother would laugh if she would look at these pictures after so many years. The poet tells that her mothers memory would be of that day, she would laugh and remember of the losses. Subsequently the poet feels how she shares that loss.
This line," There is nothing to say at all, Its silence silences."
Shows what the irony is because the silence in itself is the one thing which falls silent as the end nears.
The photograph is amusingly a dysphoric one. The condition of mother being happy in the photo and the joy of the artist to see her mother in a joyful or happy state both are associated with depressed side.
Incidentally the mother has passed away to see her happy and in the meantime the writer does not have her mother to make the poet herself joyful.
Both are entertaining yet frustrating as the condition of feeling happy and discharged is unnatural. There is a profound loss of discomfort.