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“Prayer” Introduction
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“Prayer” was written by the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate of the UK from 2009 to 2019. The poem explores what traditional religious faith can mean in modern society, suggesting that conventional spirituality can be hard to come by while also implying that some forms of faith can be found in the most mundane aspects of daily life. The poem's form mirrors its thematic ideas, as “Prayer” is a contemporary sonnet; it follows some traditional rules of the form while also making the form (like its conception of religious faith) fresh and new. “Prayer” was included in Duffy’s 1993 collection Mean Time.
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“Prayer” Summary
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On days when it's impossible to pray, sometimes a prayer suddenly emerges all on its own. In such moments, a woman who has been holding her face in her hands will raise her head and look at the musical notes that a tree seems to sing as the wind moves through its leaves. She will experience this music as an unexpected gift.
On nights when we don’t have any faith, sometimes the truth comes into our hearts, bringing with it a slight ache that feels familiar. At such times, a man will stand, totally still, and think about how the sound of a train resembles the sound of Latin being chanted in a lesson or mass from his childhood.
Now, pray for us. A first-grader’s piano scales comfort a visitor, looking out over a town in the middle of the country. Then, in the early evening, someone calls out the name of their child, and the call sounds like they are naming something they have lost.
Outside, it’s dark. Inside, the radio's shipping broadcast sounds like a prayer, listing out each place along the coast: Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
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“Prayer” Themes
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Faith and Doubt in Modern Life
In “Prayer,” the speaker presents scenes from modern society in which people seem to struggle with finding traditional religious faith. At the same time, the poem illustrates how some form of spirituality may often emerge unexpectedly from even the most familiar aspects of daily life. Secular and ordinary experiences, the poem suggests, can offer people their own kind of spiritual comfort.
The poem describes a contemporary society—a place filled with trains, radios, grade schools, and so on—marked by despair, isolation, and a distinct absence of traditional faith. The opening stanza, for example, describes a woman who “lift[s] her head from the sieve of her hands,” implying that the woman had been holding her head in her hands in a gesture of despair. Similarly, a “lodger,” or visitor, “look[s] out across a Midlands town” in apparent awareness of his isolation, in need of being "console[d]."
Despite ostensibly being part of a community—all of these people are part of the collective “we” in the poem—the poem shows these individuals experiencing a kind of deep loneliness in their daily lives. And this, the poem implies, is connected to people's inability to find faith—and the sense of comfort and consolation such faith might offer—in the modern world.
Yet though the speaker acknowledges that “we cannot pray,” the speaker also says that “sometimes […] a prayer / utters itself” and “the truth / enters our hearts.” The poem suggests, then, that though many people have lost touch with or deliberately distanced themselves from traditional religious practices, they still can experience a sense of spiritual comfort and connection via the surrounding world itself.
For example, the woman who was holding her head in her hands lifts her head at the sound of “the minims,” or musical notes, “sung by a tree.” She hears the wind in the leaves as music, and experiences this as “a sudden gift.” Likewise, the lonely “lodger” is unexpectedly comforted by hearing “Grade 1 piano scales,” perhaps floating through the window of a house.
The rhythms of daily life can be holy, the poem implies, especially in the image of a man who hears “the distant Latin chanting of a train.” The phrase “Latin chanting” evokes not only the repetition with which many people learned Latin in their childhood, but also the Latin of Catholic prayers. This description, then, suggests that this everyday sound of the train has within it a kind of mysterious “chanting” that is akin to prayer—a chance for meditation, comfort, remembrance, and connection.
At the end of the poem, the speaker describes “the radio’s prayer” at night, and then lists places that would be named in the nightly British shipping broadcast (used to alert ships off the coast to potential danger). This list of names: “Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre” would likely be familiar and ordinary to British readers, yet within the poem, the words sound once again like their own form of prayer. The poem imbues all these moments with a mysterious, even luminous quality that implies a unique kind of faith does still underlie contemporary life, and can be found within the most mundane of experiences.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-14
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Prayer”
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Lines 1-2
Some days, although ...
... utters itself.The title of the poem lets the reader know that the poem will be about prayer, and the meaning of prayer. At the same time, the title also implies that the poem itself is a prayer. From the outset, then, the title asks the reader to consider forms of prayer and faith that exist beyond traditional religious conventions.
Then, in the opening lines, the speaker describes a condition of being unable to pray—at least in a traditional sense. “Some days, although we cannot pray,” the speaker begins. The collective “we” implies that the speaker is speaking for a group of people, and perhaps for a society as a whole. The opening implies that this “we”—which could stand for many people within modern society— have difficulty praying or finding traditional religious faith.
Yet, as the speaker goes on to assert, sometimes “a prayer / utters itself.” Here, the speaker subtly personifies prayers, suggesting that “a prayer” has the ability to “utter,” or speak, itself, to emerge of its own accord. This personification imbues the idea of prayer with agency and power, and it suggests that prayer can emerge not only from people but also from the surrounding world.
The poem's sound and form help to reinforce this idea. First, the enjambment of line 1 (“prayer / utters”) conveys the complexity of what the speaker describes. The enjambment divides the prayer from its utterance, implicitly showing the difficulty of finding the ability to pray. At the same time, the enjambment requires the reader to speed up over the line ending, to reach the completion of the clause. This enjambment, then, also connects the two words together, integrating the prayer with its own utterance. Additionally, assonance and consonance connect the /er/ ending of “prayer” to “utters,” implying that this ability to “utte[r] itself” is some fundamental quality of prayer.
Finally, the speaker repeats “pray” and “prayer” at the end of the opening line. This repetition takes the form of polyptoton, since the root word “pray” repeats in a different form (here, as the noun, “prayer”). This polyptoton has several effects.
First, since the root word repeats, the repetition implies that though “we cannot pray,” prayer can still emerge, even within such experiences of doubt. At the same time, because the word takes a different form, as the verb (“pray”) shifts to the noun, the poem also suggests that the prayers that emerge might be slightly different than what people expect. These prayers might not meet traditional norms or expectations of what it means to “pray,” but they are all the more powerful and present because of this.
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Lines 2-4
So, a woman ...
... a sudden gift.
Unlock all 373 words of this analysis of Lines 2-4 of “Prayer,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Lines 5-6
Some nights, although ...
... small familiar pain; -
Lines 7-8
then a man ...
... of a train. -
Lines 9-11
Pray for us ...
... a Midlands town. -
Lines 11-12
Then dusk, and ...
... named their loss. -
Lines 13-14
Darkness outside. Inside, ...
... Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
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“Prayer” Symbols
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Music
At several points in “Prayer,” the people in the poem are described as suddenly hearing music that comforts and consoles them. In the first stanza, the woman who has had her head in her hands lifts her head at the sound of wind moving through the leaves, which she sees as “the minims,” or musical notes, “sung by a tree.” Later, the “lodger,” or visitor, who is alone in “a Midlands town” is comforted by the sound of “Grade 1 piano scales,” or a child practicing a piano in a nearby house.
Within religious tradition, music often accompanies the approach of angels, God, or another kind of spiritual presence. This music, which seems to come out of nowhere, alerts people to the approach of a sacred, mysterious presence. Music, then, can symbolize a connection between the earthly world and the spiritual or divine one.
Importantly, the people within the poem do seem to experience the music they hear this way. The woman in the first stanza experiences this “song” as “a sudden gift.” And the isolated lodger is “console[d]” by the sound of piano scales. They too, then, seem to experience this unexpected sound of music as a kind of spiritual presence, comforting them.
Yet just as importantly, the music each of these people hears is both familiar and ordinary. Most people have heard wind moves through the leaves of a tree, and the piano scales the lodger hears later in the poem are implicitly scales that would be practiced daily, by many children around the country and around the world. At the same time, it seems to be precisely this familiarity—this ordinary quality—that consoles both people in the poem, as they suddenly seem to hear, within the familiar, something holy.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 4: “the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.”
- Lines 9-10: “Grade 1 piano scales / console the lodger”
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Darkness and Night
“Prayer” evokes different times of day. While the opening stanza describes “[s]ome days,” and depicts a scene that could take place in daytime, other moments of the poem are set in the evening or at night. For example, the speaker mentions the man listening to the sound of the train in the context of what can happen “[s]ome nights,” and the person who calls their child’s name does so at “dusk.” Finally, in the closing couplet, the speaker emphasizes the state of night, saying, “[d]arkness outside.”
It is clear, within the poem, that these times of day are meant literally. The “darkness” at the end of the poem, for instance, is partly defined by the nightly shipping broadcast on the radio—an ordinary and practical part of nighttime for many people in the UK. Yet it is also important to note that both darkness and night are highly symbolic within religious traditions, with both symbolizing a state of spiritual “darkness,” or doubt.
This symbolism has several effects in the poem. First, the speaker does seem to depict people who are struggling with doubt in some way. They all seem to be essentially alone and struggling in some sense to find faith or connection. Yet as the poem describes, forms of prayer emerge unexpectedly from the world around them, offering comfort through the most familiar aspects of their lives. The poem’s ending, then, reaffirms this sense of comfort even in a time of “darkness,” by showing how the regularity and routine of this radio broadcast is itself a kind of nightly “prayer,” offering its own form of consolation and faith.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 5: “Some nights”
- Line 11: “Then dusk,”
- Line 13: “Darkness outside.”
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“Prayer” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
“Prayer” makes several allusions to British geography and culture. First, the speaker describes a “lodger,” or visitor, “looking out across / a Midlands town.” The Midlands is a region in central England. Additionally, in the last line, the speaker’s list of “Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre” alludes to the British shipping forecast. Broadcast nightly on the radio, this shipping broadcast would describe weather conditions along the coast to warn ships of potential dangers.
These allusions make it clear that the poem is set in an actual place—the UK—in a contemporary timeframe. This is important, because it means that the people within the poem experience prayer and faith within all the specificity and familiarity of their daily lives. Their experiences of faith don’t occur outside their immediate world, but within it.
At the same time, the poem also alludes to language and imagery from traditional religious narratives. For instance, when the speaker says, “the truth / enters our hearts,” this statement clearly calls to mind the idea of religious “truth” and a divine presence “enter[ing] our hearts.” Similarly, the speaker’s description of the sound of the train as “Latin chanting” alludes to the Latin of prayer and Catholic mass.
Finally, the image of the “lodger” in stanza 3 subtly alludes to the Biblical narrative in which Joseph and Mary are traveling and searching for a place to stay. Ultimately, they are allowed to stay in a humble manger, where Mary gives birth to Jesus. Similarly, the “lodger” in the poem seems alone and is unexpectedly comforted by the humble sound of piano scales.
These allusions to contemporary British life, on the one hand, and religious language and imagery, on the other, balance the poem and help to convey its meaning. They imply that the oldest forms of faith still underlie modern life, but that people can experience prayer and faith in different ways beyond the bounds of traditional religious conventions.
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Lines 5-6: “the truth / enters our hearts”
- Line 8: “Latin chanting”
- Line 10: “the lodger”
- Line 11: “a Midlands town”
- Line 14: “Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.”
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Simile
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Enjambment
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End-Stopped Line
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Alliteration
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Consonance
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Assonance
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Sibilance
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“Prayer” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Sieve
- Minims
- Lodger
- Midlands
- Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
Sieve-
(Location in poem: Line 3: “the sieve of her hands”)
A sieve is a mesh strainer, usually made out of wire, used to drain liquid. In the poem, the word is used to describe a woman's hands. The metaphor suggests that just as liquid can drain through a sieve, the woman's tears could slip through the cracks between her fingers.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Prayer”
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Form
“Prayer” is written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet. In accordance with this form, the poem has 14 lines broken up into three rhyming quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a closing couplet (a two-line stanza).
The fact that the poem is written in this form aligns it with classical traditions in poetry. Just as the poem explores the ways in which faith and prayer can still be experienced in new ways in contemporary society, the sonnet form subtly implies that poetic traditions still underlie modern poems, even if these poems reinterpret or transform traditional modes of writing.
Importantly, the poem does reinterpret the sonnet form, changing it slightly when it comes its volta, or turn. This is the moment in a sonnet that responds in some way to the question/issue/dilemma posed by the first half of the poem.
Though this poem is written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, the placement of the poem’s volta connects it to the tradition of the Petrarchan sonnet.
Petrarchan sonnets are traditionally marked by an opening eight lines (or octave) followed by a closing six lines (or sestet). The turn in these sonnets occurs at the shift between the octave and sestet. Traditionally, the volta in Shakespearean sonnets is thought to come at the closing couplet—though Shakespearean sonnets can also contain turns in different places. The turn in “Prayer” can be found at line 9, when the speaker moves to addressing the reader directly: “Pray for us now,” this stanza begins. In a sense, then, the poem alludes to both Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets, creating a contemporary poem that reimagines traditional forms.
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Meter
One crucial way in which “Prayer” reinterprets the sonnet form is through its lack of meter. Traditionally, sonnets use a fixed meter of iambic pentameter—five metrical feet, with each foot containing an iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). However, “Prayer” has no set meter. Instead, the language sounds spoken, natural, and contemporary.
This absence of meter is important to the poem’s meaning. In a sense, the poem’s use of the sonnet form implies that classical forms—of both poetry and faith—still underlie modern society. At the same time, the poem shows that prayer and faith can be experienced in ways outside traditional religious conventions, and in the most familiar and ordinary aspects of daily life. Similarly, the poem’s natural, colloquial language and rhythms—its absence of a fixed meter—imply that traditional poetic forms can be made new, to embody and convey contemporary experiences.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem follows the rhyme scheme of a traditional Shakespearean sonnet pretty closely:
ABAB CDCD EFEF AA
For the first two stanzas, the rhymes are all full. The rhymes in the first stanza, for example, are "prayer"/"stare" and "lift"/"gift." The third quatrain has a subtle slant rhyme between "scales” and “calls.” Some readers might actually take “prayer” and "stare"/"Finisterre" to be subtle slant rhymes as well, depending on their accent. Slant rhymes aren't all that uncommon in sonnets, however.
What's more interesting is that usually the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet will introduce a new rhyme sound, a "GG." Here, however, the poem repeats a sound—and, indeed, even one of the rhyme words—from the first stanza: "prayer," that initial "A" rhyme, gets rhymed with "Finisterre."
This creates an almost circular movement in the poem, as the “Finisterre” (which, in Latin, basically means "the end of the earth") that ends the poem brings the reader back to the beginning, and to the idea of “prayer.” These slight divergences from the traditional rhyme scheme, then, help to create the poem’s meaning. They convey an experience of contemporary life in which faith can be felt and experienced, but not necessarily in conventional, fixed, or expected ways.
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“Prayer” Speaker
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The speaker of “Prayer” remains unidentified within the poem. This helps its message feel universal and accessible to anyone. Adding to this effect is that fact that the speaker uses the word “we” throughout, which can be interpreted as the “we” of contemporary British society (more on that in a moment).
And yet, while the speaker speaks in the collective first person, there are aspects of the poem that imply the speaker is an individual expressing a collective experience. All the people described in the poem—the woman in the first stanza, the man in the second, the lodger in the third—seem to be alone, at least within the moment of the poem. The reader could infer that the speaker is, likewise, isolated—yet aware of a shared experience with the other people the poem describes.
The speaker also references aspects of contemporary British life and culture. The Midlands is a region in central England, and the radio broadcast to which the speaker alludes in the last line is the traditional British shipping forecast, recounted each night on the radio to alert ships off the coast to potential dangers.
The speaker, then, can perhaps be interpreted as a single person who, at the same time, identifies a shared experience within contemporary British society. The speaker speaks, within the poem, from this “we,” bringing each isolated person together in the poem as a whole.
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“Prayer” Setting
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“Prayer” is set in the contemporary UK. Several elements of the poem help to establish this setting. First, the poem alludes to aspects of British geography and culture. The Midlands is a region in the central part of England. At the end of the poem, the speaker’s list of “Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre” alludes to the British shipping forecast, broadcast every night on the radio in order to warn ships off the coast of potential dangers.
Several other details imply that the poem is set in the modern world as well. The people in the poem seem to look for some kind of faith, but not to have faith of a traditional religious kind, implying that they live in a secular society of modern times. Additionally, details like the sound of the train, the piano scales, and even the radio at the end of the poem suggest that though the poem is written in the classical form of a sonnet, it is set in a contemporary world.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Prayer”
Literary Context
“Prayer” was first published in The Times Saturday Review in 1992, and also included as the final poem in Carol Ann Duffy’s 1993 collection Mean Time. This collection won the 1993 Whitbread Poetry Award as well as the Forward Prize for Poetry. Its title refers to Greenwich Mean Time, a measurement of time taken from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. Yet it carries another meaning as well—that of the cruelty of the passage of time and the changes it can bring. “Prayer” can be understood within the context of this book as a whole, as it explores how faith and prayer can be experienced within a contemporary setting.
More broadly, “Prayer” can also be understood within the larger literary tradition of the sonnet. Originally developed in 13th-century Italy, the sonnet was revitalized by Shakespeare and other poets during the Renaissance. “Prayer” is a Shakespearean sonnet, and its adherence to this form places the poem within a classical, longstanding literary tradition.
At the same time, the poem is also distinctly contemporary—in its references, its lack of meter, and, in certain ways, its subject, as it considers how prayer can emerge within the secular and everyday aspects of life. In this sense, the poem is also in conversation with other contemporary sonnets, which attempt to reinterpret the form in different ways.
Carol Ann Duffy is the author of numerous books of poetry, children’s literature, and plays. Mean Time was her fourth poetry collection and helped to establish her reputation as a major poet. She went on to publish dozens of other collections and has become known for exploring issues of gender, sexuality, love, and loss in work that is both humane and experimental. In 2009, she became the first woman and first openly LGBTQ poet to be Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, an office she held until 2019.
Historical Context
“Prayer” explores what faith and spirituality can mean in modern life. In certain ways, the poem invokes religious traditions that once defined UK culture. For example, when the speaker describes the man who hears his “youth / in the distant Latin chanting of the train,” this can be read as an allusion to experiences of people who grew up attending Catholic mass in Latin. Yet it is clear that within the time frame of the poem, the culture the speaker describes is largely secular. The people within the poem seem to search for faith and the ability to pray, but find themselves unable to pray and “faithless”—until some unexpected, numinous experience emerges from the surrounding world.
This historical context is important to the poem. “Prayer” situates itself in a time frame when religious traditions are still somewhat present in British society, but not as pervasive and all-encompassing as they once were. Instead, the people in the poem find faith in the ordinary, familiar aspects of their lives.
Another important element of historical context is the poem's reference to the British Shipping Forecast. At the end of the poem, the speaker describes “the radio’s prayer” and then lists, “Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.” These words are names of places in the seas around the British Isles, recounted in the Shipping Forecast, which is broadcast nightly in the UK to warn ships of potential dangers along the coast. The Shipping Forecast has been broadcast for over 150 years, and many British listeners view it as a crucial element of UK culture, to the extent that it has made its way into numerous representations in music, literature, and visual art. These words at the end of “Prayer,” then, allude not only to the British Shipping Forecast in the present, but also to its historical importance, and to its fundamental familiarity within British life.
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More “Prayer” Resources
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External Resources
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Audio of Carol Ann Duffy Reading “Prayer” — Listen to Carol Ann Duffy read “Prayer” in this video created by the University of Lincoln in the UK.
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Biography of Carol Ann Duffy — Learn more about Carol Ann Duffy’s life and work in this article from the Poetry Foundation.
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Carol Ann Duffy on Poetry — Learn more about the personal experiences underlying Duffy's poetry and why she understands poetry as a vocation.
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Interview with Carol Ann Duffy — Duffy discusses what it means to be the first woman and first openly LGBTQ writer to be Poet Laureate, and why she regards poetry as the “music of humanity.”
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The British Shipping Forecast — Learn more about the British Shipping Forecast—referenced at the end of “Prayer”—and what it means, in this short video from the BBC. This video was created in 2017, the year that marked the 150th anniversary of the Shipping Forecast.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Carol Ann Duffy
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