“spools of suffering”
Stanza 1, line 2
The rolls of film are named by what they hold. The sibilance is soft and hushed, fitting the quiet of the darkroom, but the metaphor turns objects into pain: each spool contains real people’s suffering, wound up and waiting to be seen. The spools are set out in rows, which suggests order imposed on chaos, and one reading sees in those rows the lines of graves in a war cemetery. The phrase sets up the tension of the whole poem, between the calm of the process and the horror of what is being processed.
“All flesh is grass”
Stanza 1, line 6
An allusion to Isaiah 40:6 in the King James Bible, where human life is compared to grass that withers. Coming straight after three cities named in sentences of one or two words, it sounds like a verdict. It follows the Mass of line 5, as though the photographer were reading a text for the dead over his film, and it makes the deaths universal: in Belfast or Phnom Penh, every life is as fragile. Whether that is consolation or bleakness is the question to argue, and the bitter ending of the poem favours bleakness.
“Solutions”
Stanza 2, line 7
The chemicals he develops his prints in are solutions, and the word carries an obvious second meaning. The photographer has chemical solutions in abundance, sloshing in their trays, but no solution to the wars he records. The pun is quiet, placed at the start of a sentence straight after a flat statement of duty, and it points to the limits of his work: a photograph can show a problem but not solve it. The careless verb that follows it undercuts the priestly calm of stanza 1.
“Rural England”
Stanza 2, line 9
Two words, a sentence of their own, placed mid-line between full stops. The minor sentence works like a caption or a jolt: we are suddenly back home. Rural suggests fields, peace and tradition, and the lines that follow define England’s pain as the ordinary kind, the sort a change in the weather can clear. Set against fields that explode elsewhere, the phrase can be read as ironic: England’s safety is real, but it may also be what leaves its people unable to imagine what the photographer has seen.
“nightmare heat”
Stanza 2, line 12
The stanza ends on a compressed, sensory image. “Heat” could be the climate of a distant country, the heat of fire and explosions, or the fear of the moment itself, and “nightmare” makes the scene both a memory and a recurring dream, suggesting it returns to him at night. The poem names no war here. The WJEC Eduqas notes ask what the phrase might mean and, among their research links, point students to an interview with Nick Ut, whose best-known photograph shows children fleeing napalm in Vietnam in 1972. The rhyme that closes the couplet shuts the memory down firmly, as if order were being forced on it.
“half-formed ghost”
Stanza 3, line 15
As the print develops, the stranger’s face appears only partly, a literal description of an image still forming in the tray. But “ghost” tells us the man is dead, and “half-formed” suggests a life cut off before it was complete. The metaphor makes the photograph haunt the photographer: he is not looking at an image so much as being visited by the dead. It is the moment the poem’s control breaks, prepared for by the short, uneasy sentence that opens the stanza.
“sought approval”
Stanza 3, line 16
He remembers asking, silently, for permission to do what had to be done. The verb “sought” shows he felt he needed permission, so he is not a callous man. But the poem does not say whose approval he wanted, though the wife named in the same sentence is the natural reading, and it never says the approval was given; the enjambment across lines 16 and 17 leaves the request hanging. The phrase holds a version of the dilemma the WJEC Eduqas notes say interested Duffy, recording suffering without being able to help: the picture must be taken so that the world will see, yet taking it intrudes on grief.
“eyeballs prick”
Stanza 4, line 21
The poem gives these eyeballs to one reader, in the singular, standing for all of them. Duffy chooses a clinical, physical word for the reaction. “Eyeballs” are anatomy, not feeling, so the tears sound like a reflex. “Prick” suggests a small, sharp, brief sensation, nothing like the agony in the pictures, and the line break straight after it makes us wait for the tears, which arrive in the next line only to be squeezed between a Sunday bath and a drink. The effect is sardonic: the sympathy is real but shallow and short-lived.
“pre-lunch beers”
Stanza 4, line 22
The reader’s tears are placed after a bath and before a drink at lunchtime, a sudden drop from suffering to leisure that works as bathos. The plosive b sounds of the line, running from the bath to the “beers”, make it brisk and dismissive, and the hyphenated compound fixes the moment in a comfortable weekend routine. The line moves the tears on as quickly as the reader does, and the contrast with the stranger’s blood in stanza 3 is deliberate and damning.
“stares impassively”
Stanza 4, line 23
“Impassively” means without showing emotion, and it is easy to misread as not caring. The poem has just shown that he does care: his hands seem to tremble and the dead come back to him in the tray. So one reading is that his blank face is a professional mask, the composure he needs to go back to work; another is that years of exposure have numbed him. The first is better supported by the poem. Where he stares is also open: down at England, where his pictures are sold, or towards the wars where he takes them.
“they do not care”
Stanza 4, line 24
Line 21 spoke of one reader; the last line switches to a plural pronoun, and the change widens the accusation from one person to everyone at home, the public and perhaps the editor too. It cannot mean the photographer, who is always he. The monosyllables are flat and final, and the full rhyme that closes the last couplet lands with a thud of certainty. After a poem of silent trauma, the statement reads as a verdict. It also implicates the poem’s own readers, who are looking at suffering from a comfortable distance too, and that turn is what gives the ending its sting.