personal pronoun “you” and its possessive case, “your.” This technique has the effect of drawing the reader in as a participant rather than as an observer. The poet’s use of the present tense throughout creates a compelling sense of immediacy, even though the entire work is actually presented as a recollection invoked by looking at an old class photo.

An understanding of the first line, “You run round the back to be in it again,” is crucial. The line refers to the possibility of appearing in the same classroom photo twice. This is because the kind of camera that was used to capture wide images would swing slowly from one side of the room to the other. In theory, while having a classroom photo taken, one could run behind the lineup of students to the opposite end, ahead of the camera, in order to appear twice in the same photo.

Line 1 suggests to me the frenetic energy of a young child, as well as the metaphorically-circular nature of returning to another time, which occurs when viewing a photo of one’s younger self. We also learn later, in Lines 8 and 9, that not one, but two images of “yourself” in the same class photo would have been an ideal way to record the exuberance of a child who, in that particular class year, discovered a great passion and was forever changed.

In Line 2, we recognize that we as readers have been asked to imagine the teachers in that photo as “no bigger than your thumbs” who “size you up from the front row.” In any class photo I have ever seen, the teachers invariably stand at one far end or the other of the front (bottom) row. From this position, the teachers appear to stare out not at the students in the photo, but at the person looking at the image. It is the present-day self that falls under their scrutiny.

Line 4 tells us that “Miss Rose will take you now for double history.” Line 5 contains the marvelous image of a young “you” viewing the history teacher through breath on glass, thus “making a ghost of her.” This suggests to me a child who is distracted because of disconnection or boredom. The “ghost” is also a metaphor for the child’s sense that history is a “dead” subject.

Line 6, “South Sea Bubble Defenestration of Prague” is a child’s playful stringing together of words that refer to two obscure and unrelated historical events. (The South Sea Bubble was a ruinous economic event caused by a British joint-stock company in 1720; the Defenestration of Prague refers to three incidents in Bohemia dating back to 1419, 1483, and 1618, in which governors were thrown out of a castle window.) In Line 6, it is almost as though the child is saying “blah, blah, blah.”

Line 7 tells us of the child’s love for Miss Pirie. What does Miss Pirie teach? We discover in Line 10 from the reference to “The River’s Tale” by Rudyard Kipling (often taught in British schools) that Miss Pirie teaches poetry. Lines 7 through 10 reveal that the otherwise-distracted and bored speaker of the poem memorizes Kipling’s work by heart, makes it to the top of the class, and loves the teacher “so much you need two of you / to stare out from the year, serious, passionate.” Here we have a reference back to the first line. The exuberance of a child who has found her passion, and her love for the teacher who inspired it, cannot metaphorically be contained in just one image of her in that year’s class picture. It needs doubling.

It is also interesting to note that the “The River’s Tale” is a kind of bildungsroman, as it chronicles in poetic form the history of London’s River Thames. Line 12 reads: “You are making up a poem for her in your head.” This is both proof of the deep level of engagement that is taking place and the finest possible tribute to the teacher.

Lines 13 through 16 inform us that the teachers of French, Math, and certainly Geography do not inspire such tributes. Lines 16 through 18 provide both great imagery and a sense of sarcasm with regard to the “good teachers.” They

swish down the corridors in long, brown skirts,
Snobbish and proud and clean and qualified.

The teachers almost strut their sense of self-importance, which is not quite the same thing as actually being “good” at teaching.

Lines 19-22 describe an adolescent phase and tell us that the teachers know what is going on—from the hiking up of skirts and the “insolence” conveyed by silence to the rebellious act of smoking. We hear the teachers’ voices saying “you won’t pass” and “you could do better.”

Lines 22-24 describe the transition from adolescence to adulthood:

there’s the wall you climb into dancing, lovebites, marriage, the Cheltham
and Gloucester, today.
The day you’ll be sorry one day.

The “wall” is a metaphor for the guardianship of adults, the limitations of which the young person leaves in order to transition into adulthood within the larger society. It starts out as fun and then turns into weighty responsibility. “The Cheltham and Gloucester” was a savings and mortgage firm with many branch offices in the U.K.

The common teachers’ admonition, “you’ll be sorry one day,” typically said in reaction to bad behavior, is ironically applied to the responsible adult action of banking and taking on a mortgage for a house. The speaker of the poem expresses, in the last line, a deep sense of disillusionment with adulthood.