Mary F. C. Pratt's "Empty Streets" never says what happened to the town it describes. Instead it shows a street full of life, takes that life away, and lets the missing details do the talking. The title promises emptiness, yet the first stanza is crowded with women pushing baby carriages, men in bright uniforms, dogs, cats, laundry, and cooking. The street is empty only in the present, and the poem has to fill it with the past before we can feel the absence.
That first stanza is built from small, concrete, sensory things. The "yellow dogs" and the cats "napping in the sun" give warmth and idleness, the "white washing" hangs between houses, and the smells of roasting chicken and baking bread are almost audible. Even the uniforms, with their "black boots and swords," seem to belong to the picture. They may be ceremonial, though the swords could also be read as an early hint of danger. The stanza ends with its most memorable image, a red balloon "some child had let go" that drifts "above the towers and the trees." The line breaks let the balloon rise, and it is the only splash of vivid colour in the poem. It also carries a quiet note of loss, since something has already slipped out of someone's hands.
In the second stanza the poem changes tense. "Where once there was music, / there are no echoes left" is a sharp sound-image, because an echo is the faintest trace of a sound, and here even that has gone. The darkness "was bound to come" suggests that this loss was expected, though the poem doesn't say by whom or why. The poem then turns to "you": "you cannot see your broken hands." Here the reader is pulled into the damage. What follows is a string of hopeful "perhaps" clauses, with the house, the mother "all in blue with ribbons in her hair," the child-self rolling a hoop, and the lover whose jacket "smelled of lemons." These memories are not polished, though. The school has "broken stairs," the doll is "shabby," and the child-self is only a "dim version." The imagined reunions carry the same damage as the speaker's hands, so the comfort is deliberately fragile.
The last stanza is the shortest and the bleakest. "But now there is nothing" is blunt and flat, though "nothing" is immediately qualified by "but the whisperings of white-clad strangers." Who these figures are is left open. Judging by the imagery, they could be ghosts, or shrouded figures, or simply people who don't belong to the old street. The colour white links them to the earlier laundry, but the homely washing has become something cold and anonymous. The poem closes on smell, as the bread and lemons of memory give way to "a cold scent of snow" streaming "from the open doors." The doors suggest the people have gone, and the verb "streams" makes the cold feel like it is flowing into the whole street.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its lines range from the brief "men in bright uniforms" to long, trailing sentences, and the ordinary speaking rhythm makes it sound like someone remembering aloud. The lack of rhyme also withholds the small click of closure that a rhymed ending might give, which suits a poem about things left unresolved. The structure moves from the past ("Once"), through a hoped-for future ("Perhaps"), to a bare present ("now"), and it tightens as it goes.
The poem's power lies in what it chooses not to explain. Because no event is named, the reader brings their own: war, flight, death, or simply time passing. What remains is the way loss attaches itself to everyday things like a loaf of bread, a lemon-scented jacket, or a lost balloon, and how in the end they are replaced by only a cold smell on the air.