What Is Dubrow's Water Imagery?

In classic water imagery there is always a sense of renewal, change and livelihood, but Dubrow takes what is generally thought of as a sign of life and strangulates it into an ironic symbol of a woman’s extinction. Within the poem, the speaker discovers from the murky depths of “the bottom drawer” of their mother’s dresser a blue silk dress (2-3). They describe it as a “body dragged from the lake” (13), like a waterlogged memorial for a person still thought to be living. The water imagery Dubrow creates is that of an invulnerable darkness that has suffocated and swallowed a woman’s reality into the secret recesses of a drawer. In the photographs their “mother’s face was water just before a stone drops in”, but now all that is left is a blue dress and the rippled reflection of a woman who was drowned long ago (9-10). …show more content…
The speaker finds, in addition to the blue dress, a photo album which depicts “faces behind plastic film, the young couple framed with black corners” (6-8). They are photos of a moment artificially preserved, the exact illusion that the child themselves has used as a smudged lens to view her parents and their marriage. Just as the photo is encased and imprisoned, so too is the speaker’s mother. As was the case in “The Grecian Urn” by John Keats, “she cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss” (19). The illusion of the mother, truly already dead, has been preserved like leftovers in cellophane wrap and asphyxiated from the lack of