Every job in Mary F. C. Pratt's "Things She Did" ends the same way: the worker is swallowed by the work. A fisherman, a bookbinder, a grave-digger and a weaver each cross some invisible line and find that the trade has taken over their whole life. What looks like a list of former careers is really four tiny fairy tales, told in five lines apiece.
The first stanza sets the tone with a joke that turns slightly sinister. The fisherman catches a talking fish and eats it "against its objections," a phrase that makes a fairy-tale crime sound like a polite dispute at a dinner table. The punishment is wonderfully strange: "now I cannot speak / of anything but blue." Blue is the colour of water and sky, the fish's world, but it is also the colour of low spirits. The speaker has swallowed the fish and been claimed by its element. The poem never explains the logic, and that refusal is part of its charm.
Once the pattern is clear, it tightens like a knot. Each stanza opens with an occupation, hinges on "until," and closes with a consequence. The word works like a trapdoor: ordinary life on one side, enchantment on the other. In the bookbinder's stanza the offence seems almost innocent. She binds "a volume / of verses about flowers" and ends up "trapped by fragrances / and the lullabies of bees." The language here is the softest in the poem, full of long, drowsy sounds, yet the verb is "trapped." Beauty turns into a cage. A binder's job is to hold pages together, and here the pages hold her.
The grave-digger's stanza bends the pattern. It drops "Once" and has no "Now," as if the speaker has been in the cemetery so long that time has stopped dividing into before and after. The imagery is heavy and quiet: "alone among the stones," "the cool earth around me." Then comes the oddest and most tender line in the poem, "sing to the shovel, and clay," where the comma makes us pause before the last word, as though the speaker is lowering her voice. It is the most ambiguous moment. She may have been driven strange by loneliness, or she may have found a peace the other stanzas deny. Either way, the singing echoes the bees' lullabies, so that a thread of song runs from one stanza into the next.
The weaver's stanza brings the idea to a point. Her fingers tangle "in the web and pulled me in," so the loom, which should be a tool, behaves like a spider's trap. What she becomes is "a tapestry of scrap and knot," and the hard, clipped sounds of those last words feel like rough stitching. Then comes "Now I go on and on," a line that refuses to finish. This stanza invites a reading of the whole poem. A self assembled from the blue, the bees and the clay would be exactly a patchwork of scraps, and the four stanzas may be those scraps stitched together.
The form suits this. There is no regular rhyme and no fixed metre, only short lines in a plain, conversational voice. The repeated frame supplies the music instead, and its steadiness makes the impossible events sound like simple reports. The title adds a small puzzle. It says "she," while the poem speaks as "I." The text never settles this, but it suggests someone looking back at her earlier selves from a distance, almost as if they were other people.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it takes a familiar idea, that we become what we do, and makes it literal, with humour and unease in the same breath. It also declines to judge. Is the bookbinder punished or rewarded? Is the speaker who sings to clay lost or at home? Pratt lets the reader decide whether to pity these figures or envy them.