Ten short lines, and a whole lost world sits inside them. Mary F. C. Pratt's "The Garden", which the title places under the larger heading "Interviewing the Queen", opens not with a garden but with an absence: "Before the separations." The word is plural and abstract, and the poem never says which separations it means. It might be the split between people and nature, between one person and another, or between the seer and the thing seen. Leaving it open lets the word stretch to cover all of these. What follows is a picture of wholeness: a garden "that grew of itself," with no gardener, no plan and no effort, "every flower awake." The central idea is that this wholeness is not gone for good. It survives in "places, still," and in the rare people who can perceive it. The garden is less a location than a way of seeing.
The form suits that idea. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short, plain lines that sound almost like the opening of a fable. Syntax does the work that rhyme might have done elsewhere. The first four lines flow as one calm sentence, then "There are places, still." breaks in with a comma and a full stop, like a held breath. "Still" is the quiet hinge of the poem. It means "even now," but it also means motionless, hushed, as a garden is when you stop to look. Then the lines begin to lengthen, and the poem's last three lines run together as one long, unbroken sentence.
Tense matters here too. The first part sits in the past: "was," "grew." Then comes the line "Almira knew and Evelyn knows." Two names, balanced on either side of "and," with the verb shifting from past to present. Judging by the grammar, Almira's knowledge belongs to an earlier time and Evelyn's continues now, as if the vision is handed down from one person to the next. The poem gives only first names and no explanation, so they read less like characters than like witnesses, people we are asked to trust. Notice, too, that they *know* before anyone *sees*. Knowing comes first, and seeing follows as its reward.
The second "There are" is the poem's quiet sting. The first, "There are places," offers hope. The second, "There are very few," takes some of it back. The same phrase holds consolation and loss, and the poem lets both stand without choosing between them.
The final image is where the poem comes fully alive. The few "who can see" are given a close-up, and the camera moves inward: "each silver petal, / pollen grains, the throbbing veins / in every feathered leaf." The scale shrinks from petal to grain, as if attention itself were being focused like a lens. The word choices are striking. "Silver" turns a petal into metal or moonlight. "Throbbing veins" gives the plant a pulse, a body. "Feathered" makes the leaf a bird's wing. In a few words, plant, mineral, animal and human all blur into one another. This is the poem's cleverest move: it describes a world before separations by *erasing* separations in its own language. The reader is not told that everything was once connected but is made to see it in the images. The repeated "every" and "each" (every flower, every leaf, each petal) also insist on completeness. Nothing in this garden is background, and nothing is dull.
That is also why "awake" is the most telling word in the opening. If every flower is awake in the lost garden, then the world we usually walk through is, by implication, half asleep, or we are. The separations may be partly failures of attention. The poem recalls the old story of a garden before a fall, but it avoids blame and sermon. It does not demand that we return to some paradise. It suggests instead that paradise is a matter of looking closely enough to notice the pulse in a leaf.
Part of the poem's significance lies in this economy. In ten lines it gives a history, a loss, a promise and a method. It is wistful without being sentimental, since "still" and "knows" refuse to treat the garden as finished. And it ends by handing the reader a task. The few can see; the poem's last lines suggest we might learn to.