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D) when the narrator was not even born.

C) life is not permanent

C) with her cousins

Yes, the poet notices the change in the mother’s face after she was born. This could have been the outcome of sorrowful incidents or hardships in life. Age and ill health also might have made the mother lose the sweetness of her face and smile.

The poet is looking at her mother’s photograph which is indeed an old one. With it she can see how her mother looked when she was a little girl of twelve. The photo shows her on a beach with her two girl cousins who are younger than her, holding her hand.

It might have been windy at that time as their hair was flying on their faces when the uncle took the photograph. All the three smile through their flying hair. Looking at the photograph, the poet says that her mother had a sweet face, but it was a time before the poet was born.

The sea was washing their feet. The poet says that the sea has changed only a little but change has come about the ones whose feet it was washing. After 30 or 40 years, the mother would take out the photograph and take a look at it.

By that time, she was married and had a daughter. She would laugh a little and say “Look at Betty and Dolly, see how they have dressed for the beach”. By now, she can only remember those days. A huge change has come about her and she is no longer that small, innocent girl of twelve. After some years, when the poet’s mother dies, for the poet, her mother’s laughter becomes a thing of the past.

That’s why she says “the sea holiday was her past and mine is her laughter”. In the same way as the mother remembers her old days, the poet can remember her mother. The poem also shows that in due course of time, the two of them learned to live with their losses though the loss had made a permanent impression on their wry faces.

In the first stanza, the poet’s mother is shown as a twelve-year-old girl with a pretty and smiling face. She went paddling with her two cousins. This phase is before the poet’s birth. The second phase describes the middle-aged mother laughing at her own snapshot. The third phase describes the chilling pall of silence that the death of the mother has left in the life of the poet.

The sea has not changed over the years. It brings out the ‘transient’ nature of man when compared to nature and its objects. Time spares none. The pretty faces and the feet of the three girls are ‘terribly transient’ or mortal when compared to the ageless and the unchangeable sea.

There are three people in the photograph.

Melancholy marks the utterances of the poet. The poet has a deep sense of loss on losing her mother and the tone of sadness is allpervasive.

The people in the photograph are the poet’s mother and her cousins, Betty and Dolly.

No, she is dead.

I like the line ‘All three stood still to smile through their hair’. On the one hand, it creates a powerful mental picture of the three human figures against the breeze on the seashore posing for the photograph. The golden time of childhood when children are filled with mirth and are free from all worries and complexities of life is powerfully pictured here.

Smiling through the hair is typical of people who pose on the seashore. The description captures the innocuous and blithe spirit of the children which is contrasted against the care and concern of old age. It shows the poet’s power of observation and description.

The line gets connected to the title also. A photograph becomes a metaphor for all that life captures and also loses. Life is transitory and we are likely to lose many things which we will remember only through photographs.

The word ‘cardboard’ means a very stiff and thick paper. Here the cardboard is a part of the frame that keeps the photograph intact. Its use in the poem is ironical. It keeps the photograph of that twelve-year-old girl safe who herself was ‘terribly transient’. She had died years ago.

B) Betty and Dolly

D) narrator’s mother and her two cousins.

The poet has sweet memories of the smiling and sweet face of the mother which she likes. This nature of the mother is captured in the photo.

C) narrator’s mother

The poet says that her mother had been dead and now she finds herself in a situation in which there is nothing to be said but only emptiness. The silence of this situation silences her. In other words, she is left speechless. Fate has killed all the feelings in her.

By the phrase ‘of this circumstance’, the poet means the circumstance of the death of her mother. The poet puns upon the. word ‘silence’. Since there are no details, what she is left with is silence and this silence silences her.

There are different possible meanings of the use of the word ‘silence’ as verb: she cannot say anything as she does not know anything about the circumstance of the death; or she does not have words to express her feelings; or the loss of her mother has stifled her voice. If we go one step further, we can even wonder whether the silence is owing to the unnatural nature of the death of the mother.

D) silence caused by the mother’s death gives birth to a pall of silence.

The three stanzas of the poem depict the three stages in the life of the mother – as a child with her cousins, as a mother looking at the old photograph, and as a memory for the daughter after her death. She had a smiling and sweet face in the photograph when she posed for it, holding the hands of her cousins.

However, the poet cannot remember witnessing the same cheerfulness on the mother’s face in her recollections of her mother after she was born. What could have been the reason for the change? Apparently, the poet’s mother had posed for the photograph with her cousins when she was young and was not yet bogged down by the responsibilities and hardships of life.

As people age, along with inevitable physical changes, they also experience a change in their mental make-up because of the challenges in life. The line,’… how they dressed us for the beach,’ indicates that the mother herself was quite young and followed the directions given by others when she accompanied her cousins to the beach.

An uncle was taking the snapshot.

The poet’s mother would laugh at the snapshot as it would revive her memories of the old happy days on the sea beach and the strange way in which they were dressed up for the beach. The laugh indicates her youthful spirit.

Both the poet’s mother and the poet suffer a sense of loss. The mother has lost her childlike innocence and joyful spirit that the photograph captured years ago. For the poet the smile of her mother has become a thing of the past. Ironically, both labour to bear this loss with ease.

Actually, both the poet and her mother suffer a sense of loss. The mother loses her carefree childhood. She can’t have those moments of enjoyment again that she once experienced at the beach. She can’t be a sweet smiling girl of twelve again.

This is also the poet’s loss. Perhaps she will never see that smiling face and experience her laughter again in life. The irony of the situation is that both of them struggle to bear the loss with tolerable ease.