A Smile to Remember
A Smile to Remember - meaning Summary
A Smile Amid Domestic Violence
The poem depicts a childhood scene where cheerful small details—a bowl of goldfish and a mother’s coaxing smile—exist beside routine domestic violence. The speaker, addressed as Henry, observes his father’s repeated beatings and the mother’s insistence that they be happy, culminating in the death of the goldfish. The final image—mother smiling while tragedy unfolds—captures the painful contrast between appearance and emotional reality in an abusive household.
Read Complete AnalysesWe had goldfish and they circled around and around in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes covering the picture window and my mother, always smiling, wanting us all to be happy, told me, "be happy Henry!" And she was right: it's better to be happy if you can, but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't understand what was attacking him from within. My mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! Why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw one day the goldfish died, all five of them, they floated on the water, on their sides, their eyes still open, and when my father got home he threw them to the cat there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother smiled
... cause that's all she could ever do. And seated on this desk I wonder, should a smile be a symbol of joy, sadness or both, or even anything. I was taught daily to smile in sorrow, similarly, in good situations. Smiles, they're confusing to me, so I never wear them at any moment in life, I laugh or cry.