The poem begins by shrinking a person down to a shadow and then spends its remaining lines arguing that this is nothing to grieve. "She" is first "a shadow on the grass," then a shadow "cast by a star," then "a figure / on a ground so vast that even she / can not see herself." Each repetition of "She is" redefines her, and each redefinition makes her smaller and more connected to everything around her. The central idea is that a single life, seen against enough space and time, stops looking like a fragile object and starts looking like part of the pattern. That is why fear of death can finally be questioned.
The title carries the argument. "Figure and ground" is a term from art and the study of perception: the figure is the thing you notice, the ground is what it sits against. Pratt lets the two trade places. The woman is a figure, but she is made of shadow, so she exists only because light and surface meet. "Ground" also turns up three times with different meanings: grass under her feet, the "ground so vast" of the opening, and at the end "this ground of time." The word slides from soil to cosmos to something close to the grave.
The poem also builds its ground in layers. "Mosses grow under / the grasses. Stars behind the sun." The star "so plain it bears a simple name" is, judging by that line, the sun, and the poem quietly demotes it to one star among many, with others waiting behind it. The ground has depth downward and outward. Then the poem gives us a small piece of real landscape, "the eastern mountains / and the field all green and yellow," and the colour feels like a brief rest before the harder images arrive.
Those images are "each / pebble" that "burns its shadow" and "each broken / sparrow on the road's cold shoulder." "Burns" is a strange, strong verb. It makes a shadow sound like a scorch mark left by the light, as if even a pebble is branded with the sun's attention. The sparrow shifts the temperature at once. "Cold shoulder" is a physical place, the edge of a road, but it also carries the sense of being turned away from. Death is not hidden here. It is lying at the roadside with the pebbles, one more thing casting a shadow.
The question that follows turns on the word "against." "Why / would anyone be afraid to die / against this curve of space, this ground of time?" To be set against a background means both to stand out from it and to be measured by it. The poem leans on the second meaning without losing the first. The question doesn't sneer at fear. It simply asks the reader to look at the whole picture, and the picture does the arguing.
The form supports this. There are fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but no regular rhyme scheme, and the sentences ignore the line breaks. Lines 1 and 4 both end on "she," so the pronoun is left hanging at the edge of the line, small and slightly exposed. "Stars behind the sun" is a short, flat fragment, almost like a label. The question beginning "And why" comes near where a sonnet would turn. Sound does the work of rhyme near the end: "die" and "time" share a long vowel, and the last two lines close on "airs" and "stars." The final line returns to the star of line 2, but the verb has changed from "cast" to "pull." Shadows are no longer thrown down but drawn out, like thread from a spool.
The ending is quietly daring. "Her breath streams a shadow through still airs" makes even breathing a kind of shadow-making, so that her living is the same activity as the sun's and the planets'. In the last line, "Passing planets pull dark shadows from their stars," she has become one among many bodies doing the same thing. Her smallness is not cancelled, but it is no longer lonely.
The poem is worth reading because it consoles without denying anything. The sparrow stays broken and the shoulder stays cold. What changes is the angle of view. A poem could have simply told us not to fear death. This one gets there through a visual idea, and the idea is enough to make the question at its centre feel almost answered.