Most ghost stories ask us to fear the dead. Mary F. C. Pratt's "Closets" suggests something stranger: the ghosts crowding our cupboards may not belong to the past at all. The speaker begins by describing two kinds of closet, one full of keepsakes and one full of unlived possibilities. She then loses patience and drives the ghosts out with a broom. Her central claim is that nostalgia and regret are often not memory but anxiety, a rehearsal of losses that haven't yet happened.
The opening stanza sets up a pleasantly spooky scene and quietly undercuts it. The ghosts "tiptoe around the dusty boxes" and their "bony toes rattle on the floor," a detail that is more comic than frightening. They "moon over a ragged doll" and "caress a tattered book," and the verb "moon" makes them sound like lovesick teenagers. Even the objects are worn out: "ragged," "tattered," "dusty." Sentiment here is shabby and a little ridiculous, though still tender.
The second closet is more serious. It holds "things of the mind, things of the heart," and the lines that follow all hang on the same conditional phrase: "things I might have done, / things I might have made, / people I might have loved." These are not memories of what happened but of what didn't. The ghosts' verdict, "your precious past, / so sad, so sweet, so—passing," is cleverly double. "Passing" means time going by, but it also echoes "passing away," and the dash makes the line stumble, as if the ghost cannot finish its sigh.
The second stanza shows why the speaker hesitates. The ghosts don't threaten her; they bargain. They "cajole," "whine," and "touch all my soft spots." They borrow the faces of her mother, her dead sister, and "the men who came so close," a phrase that leaves a whole history of near misses unexplained. Their best argument is that they hold "all the stories I have to tell," so sending them away feels like erasing herself. When she looks fierce, "they weep," which makes her seem like a bully and the reader almost sorry for her.
The turn comes in the third stanza, whose short, hammering lines break the quiet of the first two. She shouts "You are future ghosts!" and the poem becomes a list of accusations, each beginning "You are not" or "You are." The repetition builds like an argument finally coming together. The ghosts are "not even memory, / but fear of memory and its distortion" and "not keepsakes, but anticipation of loss." The plural "pasts" and "futures" in the closing lines are telling. Regret multiplies our possible lives, and fear corrupts the ones we actually had. Her command, "Be gone!", is the shortest line in the poem.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme scheme or steady metre, and it reads like speech: confiding at first, then furious, then briskly practical. Its sound effects are small and effective, such as the soft "powdery heads" and the "so... so... so" of the ghosts' sigh. The final stanza is built from quick physical verbs: "whimper," "cringe," "stamp," "wave," "flutter." The domestic broom turns an exorcism into housework. The ghosts leave "like ragged moths," and the word "ragged" returns from the first stanza. The ghosts have become as worn as the doll they once adored, and moths are creatures that eat stored cloth, which gives the image a sly edge.
The last two lines are the most debatable: "The future becomes nothing but itself / and all my things, nothing but things." The tautologies are deflating. The future is no longer shadowed by dread, and the keepsakes stop being relics. That can be read as liberation, or as a slightly bleak loss of meaning, since the dolls and letters no longer glow. The poem does not decide, and that restraint keeps it from being a tidy lesson.
What makes "Closets" worth reading is its psychological accuracy, delivered with humour. It takes a familiar gothic image and uses it to separate remembering from worrying about remembering. Anyone who has kept a box of old letters, or lain awake over a road not taken, will recognise the speaker, and her broom may look more tempting than it first seems.