Eight short lines, and the word "dead" appears in none of them. Mary F. C. Pratt leaves that to the title, "The Corpse", a word we usually reserve for people, and then uses the poem to show why it fits.
The scene is simple: a small animal's body lying on the ground. The "soft spotted hide" and "pointed feet" will lead most readers to picture a fawn, though the poem never names it, so that is an inference, if a strong one. The speaker begins in the past tense, "It was such a little thing", in the half-sorrowful voice of someone looking down at what is left. Then comes the present: "It lies there now." The shift from "was" to "now" marks the moment a living creature becomes an object, and the poem stays right on that edge.
Its central idea is how a small, defenceless life can be made to matter through scale alone. The creature is "little" twice, once as a "little thing" and again in its "little chest". Then the last line changes the measure: "its child-sized heart cut away." Suddenly the animal is being weighed against a human child, and the title's heavy word is justified. The poem never says that a child and a fawn are equal. It simply lets the comparison arrive at the end, when the reader can't dodge it.
The imagery works through contrast. The spotted coat is the kind of marking that, in life, would help a young animal disappear into the forest floor. Here it makes the body "nearly invisible / in the brown leaves". That is my reading, but the irony seems built in: the camouflage that should have protected it now only helps hide the loss. The softness of the opening, "soft spotted hide", gives way to the damage in the last three lines, and the sounds follow. The gentle s and t sounds of the first lines turn into the hard k sounds of "cracked" and "cut".
The verbs are chosen carefully too. "Opened" is almost a gentle word, the sort you'd use for a door or a book, which makes the next one, "cracked", land harder. Both are past participles with nobody attached. We are never told who or what did this. The word "cut" suggests a blade rather than teeth, so judging by the language, a human hand is implied, but the poem doesn't accuse anyone. It leaves a blank where the doer should be, and that blank is chilling. Even the speaker is missing as a person: there is no "I", no reaction, only looking.
The form supports this restraint. There is no rhyme and no regular metre; the poem is free verse, and its rhythm comes from line length. The lines stay short and plain, then the fourth stretches out to "nearly invisible", a long, trailing word that nearly dissolves into the leaves. After that the lines clip down again, and "ribs cracked" is the shortest of all, two syllables with two hard stresses, breaking off the way a bone might. The final line is slower and weighted: "child-sized", "heart", "cut" each take a stress, and the poem ends on "away", a word of removal. Nothing follows it, no comfort and no moral.
The vocabulary also deserves attention. "Hide" belongs to the animal world, but "feet" instead of "hooves" sounds plain, almost like a child's description, and then "child-sized" arrives. The poem holds the animal and the child in the same language until they are hard to separate.
That is where its significance lies. Pratt doesn't tell us how to feel; she gives us a few exact, quiet details and trusts them to do the work. The heart has been removed from the body, and the poem's last image leaves the reader with that absence.