Imagery and Sound

Couples dancing

The poem is dominated by the image of the family snap, the dog-eared photo that turns up many years after the event in a shoe-box or album, and leads to the (imaginary?) conversation recorded in this poem. Interestingly, there is no actual mention of this photo; but we can see it clearly in the description of the three-girls-out-on-the-town scene in stanzastanza: A group of lines of poetry that make up a unit - like a paragraph in a piece of prose; a verse. 1.

The poet deploys a great deal of glittering light to evoke the excitement of carefree teenage existence: the ballroom "fizzes" with light; the tree under which the mother is kissed has "lights" in it; mother and child "stamp stars" from the pavement as they cha-cha home from Mass; life before motherhood waltzes and "sparkles".

Sound

The poem is written to sound as if the poet is talking to her mother, so the poet follows the patterns of ordinary speech. Many phrases begin with I, as if the poet wanted to assert her presence even before she was a presence: 'I'm ten years away .. I knew you would dance like that.'