Few poems turn a household chore into a ghost story as quietly as "Rummage the House in Vain." Nathalia Crane gives us a family of women, the "daughters" of Robinson Crusoe, who keep searching an ordinary house for something that has gone missing: not a object, exactly, but a voice. The sea chest that once held Crusoe's belongings now sits in a windy attic under a swallow's nest, doing humble duty as a "prop for the ironing board." Its former tenant, a "phantom polly" (a parrot), no longer shouts, jigs or begs for gin. The poem's central idea is the way vivid, noisy life drains into dust, and how those left behind go on setting out bait for something that will not come back.
The most interesting move is the way the poem treats the parrot. In Defoe's novel the parrot is a companion; here it is a "brazen mimic" that once boasted of "his ghostly honor — being the watch below." A mimic is by definition a borrowed voice, and that is what makes the loss so strange. The daughters are not mourning a person but an echo of one, a bird imitating a sailor's talk and a sailor's jokes. Even the "midnight jest" of grounding the musket, guarding "a desert island / Locked in a sailor's chest," suggests a whole imagined world shrunk down to the size of a wooden box. The island, the hoard and the legend have all been packed away inside it, and the box itself is now furniture.
Crane builds this feeling through sensory detail. The chest is "smelling of tar and seaweed," so the sea survives only as a smell, the faintest kind of memory. Against that salt and tar she sets domestic sweetness: the phantom "sobbed for a sunflower pastry," and the daughters now go on "mixing enticing pastries / Fit for a phantom's need." Baking becomes a ritual of invitation, almost a séance conducted with seeds and flour. The detail that "stairways are taught to listen" is lovely and odd, the whole house trained into patience, waiting for a squawk or a clink of anchor chain that never comes.
The form supports this mood of ritual and repetition. The poem is written in short quatrains of brisk, lightly stressed lines, with a rhyme scheme that mostly pairs the second and fourth lines ("chest" and "nest," "hoard" and "board," "jest" and "chest"). Those echoing chest rhymes are fitting, since the chest is what the poem circles around. The refrain-like opening line, "Robinson Crusoe's daughters," returns later and is answered at the close by "Robinson Crusoe's laughter, / Robinson Crusoe's fears." The shift from "daughters" to "laughter" is only a few letters, but it moves us from the searchers to the thing they search for, and the final phrase, "dusty and stained with years," settles like dust itself. The stanza order is also slightly loose: one rhyme, "hoard" and "board," is pushed into the middle of a stanza, as if the poem, like the household, has a few things out of place.
What makes the poem memorable is its tone. It is playful, with its gin-begging parrot and sunflower pastry, yet underneath runs a gentle ache. The word "vain" in the title is carried through every stanza, and the speaker never explains why the daughters keep looking. That silence is the point. Grief and nostalgia, the poem suggests, rarely behave sensibly; they bake pastries for ghosts. By putting a famous adventure story into an attic and an ironing board, Crane shows how legends survive in families: not as grand tales but as smells, objects and habits, slowly turning to "remnants of old devotions."