Anyone who has shared a road trip has met both of these people, and probably has a guess which one they are. Mary F. C. Pratt's "Two Kinds of People" turns that familiar difference into a three-stanza sketch. On one side are the people who find a spot and want to stay. On the other are those who suspect the better spot lies just ahead. Travel, the opening stanza says, is what exposes the difference, because a journey keeps forcing the same question: do we stay, or do we go?
The form is as easygoing as the subject. Each stanza is a quatrain rhyming ABCB, so only the second and fourth lines chime: *clear* and *here*, *style* and *mile*, *slow* and *go*. The rhythm sits close to ballad measure, with longer lines of about four beats alternating with shorter ones of about three. "And TRAVeling MAKES that CLEAR" has the quick, singable lilt of a campfire song, and the short lines land like small punchlines. The rhymes are plain and sturdy. They pair a word of staying (*here*) with a word of measuring distance (*mile*), and the poem keeps this homely, conversational pitch throughout.
The poem's engine is repetition. "One kind" opens line after line, and in the last stanza it becomes "some… while some," so the sentences themselves mirror the two camps. The order is worth watching, though. The first stanza names the movers first ("always moving on"), but the second and third put the settlers first. That means the last line belongs to the movers, and the poem ends on the word "go." It leaves just as its restless travelers do, without lingering over a conclusion.
The word choices hold most of the poem's humour and character. The settlers "pitch the tent / And settle in, in style," and that doubled "in, in" gives the line a comfortable stutter, as though the speaker has already put her feet up. "Style" is gently funny too, since it suggests that staying put in a tent is a matter of pride and a little vanity. The next stanza goes further: these people "learn the view." We usually learn a lesson or a language, so the phrase treats scenery as something that deserves study, and it credits the sitters with patience and attention. Their coffee is drunk "slow," a casual adverb without its *-ly* that slows the line with its single long vowel. The movers get a very different set of verbs: they "run round and pack the car." The motion is busy and slightly scattered, and "'Cause now it's time to go" has a clipped, offhand feel, as if no one has ever needed a better reason.
The most interesting moment is a small shift in pronoun. For most of the poem the speaker describes "one kind" and "some" from outside, like a cheerful observer. Then, in the movers' second-stanza line, she says "If we go just one more mile." That "we" slips her into the picture, and it's tempting to read it as a hint that she knows the pull of the next mile from the inside. This is an inference from a single word, but it fits the poem's warmth. The "just" in "just one more mile" is also telling, because it captures how the mover's reasoning works: the better place is always only a little further on, and it can always be postponed again.
The poem's significance lies in how lightly it handles an old habit of thought. "There are two kinds of people" is the kind of sweeping claim that usually comes with a verdict attached. Here the tidy division is offered with a smile and no winner. Settlers are comfortable and a bit smug, and movers are energetic and a bit frantic, but neither is called right. The poem sets two ways of meeting the world side by side and lets readers find themselves in one of them, or, like the speaker with her telling "we," in both.