Some poems describe a memory; this one stages the moment a memory comes alive. Its subject is the opening of an old photo album, and the strange fact that faces we thought we had fixed in the past can suddenly speak again. Peter Viereck's central idea is that remembering is a kind of creation, and that this is why the poem borrows, in its last line, the language of the Bible's opening: the way the dead page wakes into life resembles the way, in Genesis, dust was made into a living person.
The poem is two quatrains, and the division matters. The first stanza watches the album stir; the second explains what that stirring means. In the opening line, the speaker addresses a "brittle echoed kiss," which is a clever compression. A kiss is a vanished event, an echo is a vanished sound, and "brittle" suggests the old paper and fading prints that hold them. Yet this faint trace "quickened" something, and the word does double duty: it means to hurry up, but also, in an older sense, to bring to life. The "ebbing cycle" is probably the speaker's own life or love running down, and the kiss reverses the tide. "See what you set stirring!" is a pleasingly casual, almost scolding exclamation, as if the speaker were blaming a small gesture for stirring up so much.
The images in the first stanza are all of waking: a "drowsy album stretching," "snapshots whirring." The album is treated like a sleeper getting out of bed, and the whirring of the snapshots suggests wings, or perhaps the flicker of a film projector. Then comes the poem's cruellest comparison. Each face is "just as flat as book-pressed flower." A pressed flower keeps its shape and loses its life; it is a memento, pretty and dead. The line captures the disappointment of nostalgia, where a person is reduced to a two-dimensional likeness.
The second stanza breaks that flatness. Faces "we once as photo fondled" now wake "in three dimensions" and are "singing." Here the poem's structure does its work: the stanza literally adds a dimension. The odd word order of "as photo fondled" has a slightly old-fashioned, compressed feel, but it also shows the speaker's earlier love as touching a surface, never the real face. Singing is a lovely choice of verb. A photograph is silent and still, so song is the opposite of everything a photo is.
Then the poem makes its boldest move. "Now we know how dozing clay was kindled / By one warm Was of Word inthebeginning." The clay recalls the creation of the first human from earth, and the closing phrase echoes the opening of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word." Viereck changes it in two striking ways. He runs the words together as "inthebeginning," so the phrase rushes out like one breath, and he capitalizes "Was," turning a plain past-tense verb into a holy name. The effect is a pun with real force: what brings the past to life is the word "was" itself, the grammar of memory. To say "she was" is to resurrect her, and to be warm about it is to give her breath. Memory, the poem proposes, works on us the way creation worked on clay.
The sound of the poem supports this. The rhymes are loose and unobtrusive, with "our" and "flower" chiming at the ends of lines one and four, while "fondled" and "kindled" make a gentler pair in the second stanza, and the lines have a steady, slightly stretched rhythm that gives the feeling of someone turning pages slowly. The alliteration of "stretching" and "stirring," and the whirr in "whirring," keep the first stanza physically active, so the language itself seems to wake up.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into eight short lines: a small domestic scene, a theory of memory, and a religious echo, held together without strain. It also leaves a useful question behind. If a word like "was" can rekindle a face, then the album's real power may lie less in the pictures than in the act of looking, and speaking, that wakes them.