Someone in a gallery is worried about the carpet. That is where Mary F. C. Pratt's poem begins, "among the paintings, / installations of true Art," where the Plaster People "blunder" in and leave "powdery tracks" behind them. The speaker is appalled, but the poem is clearly enjoying itself at that speaker's expense. "The good carpet" is the one kept for best, and "true Art," with its capital letter and faint sniff, belongs to someone guarding a small, very clean territory. The prim "One can't have them" in the second stanza completes the portrait: a voice that speaks for the institution and has never asked whether the institution wants to be spoken for.
Who the Plaster People are, the poem never says, which is part of its pleasure. Judging by the imagery, they could be the crowds who tramp through culture without reverence, or humanity in general, made of something crumbly and always shedding. Plaster is a humble material, the stuff of walls, casts and copies rather than marble. It suggests imitation and fragility, yet these figures are anything but fragile in effect. They wreck, deface and bury.
The hinge of the poem is its tiny middle stanza. The speaker complains about "dust, / clouds and billows," then adds, almost against their own intention, "the stuff of stars." The complaint swells into something cosmic. Dust is what the carpet-lover wants swept away, but it is also, in the poem's own words, the raw material of stars, and the old phrase "dust to dust" seems to hover over these lines. The mess is not the opposite of creation. It is where creation comes from.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre. Its short lines stumble across their breaks much as the Plaster People stumble across the floor. "Defacing all that is" stops on the small word "is," leaving the speaker's idea of the canon hanging in mid-air. The sound is still carefully managed. The soft, puffing p's of "paintings," "Plaster People," "powdery," "powdery" and "poofy" make the reader's mouth release little clouds of breath, as if blowing dust off the page. The speaker's own preferred phrase, "canonical and clear," is all clipped, hard c's. The sounds take sides before the argument does, with the puff set against the crisp edge. The repeated "powdery" also does what dust does, turning up again when you thought you had cleaned.
In the final stanza the vocabulary changes. "Hordes" is a word from the histories of empires, where it names whoever is battering at the gate, and it fits the speaker's panic. The Plaster People "trample / up from the foundations," a strange direction for trampling, which usually goes down. They rise like damp through a wall, or like a crowd, and the suggestion is that the building itself rests on them. Then comes the largest claim: "They have buried / every civilization in turn." Beside that, the fuss over a carpet, and over the canon too, begins to look very small.
The last two lines echo the famous boast in Shelley's "Ozymandias": "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Pratt turns it around: "Oh, look on their creative / struction, and despair!" The invented word "struction" is the cleverest moment in the poem. It could be "construction" with its front sliced off, or "destruction" with its front sliced off, and the poem will not say which. That is the point, since what the Plaster People do is building and ruin at once. The line break splits the word itself, so the form acts out what the word means. The despair is presumably the speaker's, but the reader may enjoy it differently. Ozymandias's monument was undone by sand, and here the dust has a swagger of its own.
The poem is significant because it is so compact. In twenty lines it turns a housekeeping grievance into a view of history in which every canon, carpet and empire ends up under the same powder. It does so without lecturing, simply by letting a fussy voice give itself away.