The poem summarizes an old woman’s life experience in some few words: ‘The dream / and / the years / - Little girl, / that is all’. In the painting, the drawn lines, which expand her furrows to become the visual pattern of the whole image, produce an atmosphere of quiet resignation. The girl behind her can be interpreted as being somebody listening to her as well as representing herself as a child or the memory of her childhood. The visual by its own means and with its various meanings can be said to articulate the sense of melancholy and of a split second of consciousness aimed at in the poem.