Imaginary friends are supposed to be the bright side of childhood: companions who agree to every game and never have to go home. The speaker of Mary F. C. Pratt's poem has been given the opposite. Her invisible friend "can't sit still," cries, and wrings her hands, a gesture that belongs to grown-up fretting, not the playground. The poem is a portrait of anxiety turned into a person, and its last three lines turn that portrait around to face the reader.
The speaker begins kindly. "I ask her to come outside with me," she says, but the friend would rather sit "under the table / in the dark," a child's hiding place that is also a retreat from the world. What she offers instead is storytelling, "about the terrible things / that happened, or might happen." That one clause covers everything an anxious mind covers: the past and the future, with no present in between. We never hear the stories themselves, only that she wants to tell them. Leaving the dread unspecified makes it feel larger.
Then the portrait turns oddly comic. The friend is "fussy about her fingernails, / the fit of her socks," so her torment lives in small, bodily irritations. She goes to bed at the same hour every night and rises "at sunrise / or just before," and that last phrase is both the funniest and the saddest detail. Even the dawn must not catch her unprepared. The tone throughout is a weary, slightly patronising tenderness, announced in the opening "poor thing," like someone describing a difficult relative.
The central paradox comes in the sentence that crosses a stanza break: "She never has time / for anything important, and / she never does anything // trivial." The lineation makes us wait for that last word. Her days are tightly organised, yet she meets neither of the things a life needs, big purposes or small, idle pleasures. Trivial things such as games, daydreams and wasted afternoons are exactly what a child's imaginary friend should be for, and this one has no room for them.
The form supports the portrait. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only the rhythm of plain speech, with short declarative sentences and mostly one- and two-syllable words. The poem runs in eight couplets, and nearly every sentence spills over the gaps between them ("rises / every morning," "and / she never does anything"). The tiny stanzas feel as cramped as the space under the table, while the sentences keep slipping out of them, like something that cannot settle. Then the pattern breaks. The final stanza has three lines, one more than the poem has prepared us for, and the extra line is a question that will not fit.
That ending is where the poem turns. "I don't take her anywhere," the speaker insists, as if she were in charge, but the friend "follows and precedes me / everywhere." The verb "precedes" is the surprise. Worry does not only trail behind us; it arrives ahead of us, imagining the terrible thing before we reach it. The repeated "asking, asking" has the nagging insistence of a small child, and the questions come without quotation marks, so they seep into the poem's own voice. "Who is imaginary?" can be read two ways. The friend may be the speaker's own anxious self, split off and disowned, or the calm, coping "I" may be the fiction. "Are you sure you are real?" is never answered, and the poem stops there.
The poem is significant because it takes a familiar, rather sweet figure and uses it to say something unsettling about the self. The parts of us that we pity, manage and refuse to bring along do not go away. They gain a routine, a personality and a persistent voice, and they may seem more solid than the composed person who denies them. The poem makes this point with dry humour and everyday detail, which is why the last question lands so hard.