Six short lines, and almost nothing happens in them: a woman cries, and the tears run from her face onto her body. What the poem does with that small event is what makes it worth reading. The word "tears" never appears. Instead Uma Gray gives us a chain of substitutions: petals, footprints, kisses. Each one makes grief a little more beautiful and a little more unsettling. The central idea seems to be that sorrow does not end when the crying begins. It lingers as something cold, delicate and strangely tender, a residue left on the body.
Start with "Petals of the sea." It is an impossible flower, and the impossibility fits. The sea suggests salt, and so tears, but it also suggests enormous quantity, a grief too big to hold. Calling its drops "petals" reduces that vastness to something light and breakable. Then comes "drifting down her cheeks." Petals drift, they don't pour, so the verb slows the whole scene. The tears move as though time has thinned. In the next line they become "silver footprints," and the image turns again. Silver is bright but cold, and it is the colour a dried tear-track leaves on skin in the light. Footprints are what someone leaves when they walk away, so the line quietly carries a sense of departure. The tears are small travellers crossing a face, and what they leave behind is a record of passing.
The fourth line is the only complete sentence: "They fall to land on her breasts." The camera, if we think of the poem as a close-up, has moved from face to body. "Fall to land" is a slightly longer, plainer phrase than the lines around it, and it works like a small thud after all that drifting. The mention of her breasts makes the scene intimate, even erotic, which makes the next line more jarring: "Cold kisses after death." Here the poem gives us its one fixed fact, that someone, or something, has died. It never says who. The kisses could be the tears themselves, landing on her skin like a lover's mouth but cold. They could be a last kiss from the dead, reaching her through her own weeping. Or they could be kisses given to a body that has already gone cold. The poem leaves all three possible, and the uncertainty is part of its mood. Grief here blurs love and loss until they feel like one sensation.
The form is spare. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and end-stopped, each closing with a full stop as if the speaker must pause before looking again. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly five, five, six, seven, six, then four. The poem lengthens as the tears gather and fall, then drops sharply at the end. Several lines are fragments with no main verb ("Leaving silver footprints"), which gives them a stilled, picture-like quality. The sounds help too. The soft "s" and "l" of "Petals of the sea" and "silver" feel liquid. They give way to the hard, clipped "Cold kisses" ("k" and "d"), where the tenderness turns icy.
The poem is framed by its title, «After sorrow.», which returns as the final line. That repetition closes a circle, so the poem ends where it began, with nowhere further to go. It also shifts the meaning of "after." Line five has "after death", and the last line has "after sorrow". Sorrow is placed as something that has already happened, so what we watch is its aftermath, when the first violent grief has passed and only the quiet, cold traces remain. The final line is the shortest, and it has the weight of a door closing.
What makes the poem notable is how much it does with so little. Crying is one of the most worn-out subjects in poetry, and the poem manages to make it look new by never naming it. It trusts images, a brief shape and an open question about the death to carry the feeling. A reader is left with a picture of silver on skin, and the sense that sorrow, once it has passed, still leaves marks.