Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy is a spiritual poem regarding the modern attitudes towards praying, and in some instances, the lack of it. The poet is essentially using a microcosm of individual lives to express their religious struggles, and thus encouraging readers to have faith in low or desperate times. In this essay I will discuss many linguistic features as Duffy essentially aims to persuade her readers into living a happier and more faithful lifestyle. These foregrounded features are crucial in understanding the deeper, implicit meaning behind the poem.
Elements of Parallelism are foregrounded twice in the poem to allow the reader to recreate the feeling and image that the persona and Duffy had when writing it. In the first stanza, Duffy includes lexical choices which create alliteration and consonance including ‘stare’ ‘minims’ ‘sung’ and ‘sudden’. Furthermore, the smooth and peaceful ‘s’ sound only begins when the woman looks up from her ‘sieve of her hands’, thus accentuating the fact that a time of reflection or prayer can only be administered when an individual looks up and appreciates the beauty of ‘minims sung by a tree’. In a similar way, in the second stanza, one of the persona’s Duffy describes, is reminded of their Latin lessons as a boy through the sound of a train. Like before, the poet uses the repetition of the sound ‘t’, including monosyllabic or disyllabic words such as ‘distant’, ‘Latin’, ‘chanting’ and ‘train’ to mirror the sound of the train in the distance. Simultaneously, as the man reminisces on his childhood, the soft ‘t’ sound is representing the distance the man has between the train. Thus, by doing this it is replicating the metaphorical distance between the man and his youth, and the ‘familiar pain’ that he endures as he acknowledges he cannot be young anymore.
From a prosodic perspective, Duffy continues the tradition of including a Shakespearean style sonnet which is in the rhythm of an iambic pentameter. However, the poet breaks this convention at the end of the poem by graphologically separating the last rhyming couplet from the rest of the poem thus internally deviating it. The ambiguous last line of the poem (‘Rockhall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre’) features four minor sentences which are the Shipping Forecasts, that were typically used on BBC Radio Four. The three trochees, followed by an anapest symbolises a chant, which, based on the rhythm, could be mistaken for a prayer. Furthermore, Duffy included this separation to interrupt the rhyme scheme, therefore making it ababcdcdefefgg. The final gg is disconnected from the rest of the poem to allow readers to solely pay attention to ‘the radio’s prayer’ and nothing else. Thus, due to this, the poet is attempting to mirror the poem’s form to its meaning, emphasising that there are prayers in everyday life, even in the shipping forecast, and individuals should attempt to acknowledge this more. Additionally, it is informing readers that no matter how busy life gets, there will always be a prayer that ‘utters itself’, and people must have more faith to recognise it.
Although internally deviated graphological forms are limited in the poem, Duffy attempts to make a statement through maintaining a neat structure, excluding the internally deviated rhyming couplet, previously mentioned. By doing this, the poet’s aim is to truly highlight the regimented structure of individuals’ lives, yet, the final stanza represents the breaking free of this routine, and consequently allowing people to have the time to acknowledge prayer and faith. However, Duffy interestingly uses the physical form of the poem to represent sights and feelings of the personas, which she particularly highlights in the second stanza. She describes a lodger who looks ‘across’ over ‘a Midland’s Town’. Yet, ‘a Midland’s town’ is moved onto line eleven, leaving the adverb ‘across’ on line ten. Through using the physical form of the poem, Duffy is able to present the image to the reader, emphasising the reflective and nostalgic mood that the persona is portraying.
Lexically, Duffy uses first person plural pronouns to offer a sense of unity for the reader. Pronouns such as ‘our’ and ‘we’ are parallelised throughout the poem to indicate that having faith and praying, does not have to be a religious experience. The main suggestion that Duffy is implying is that praying is about feeling at peace and having faith in oneself and others around. Furthermore, by using these pronouns, it is conclusive that prayer is a communal experience; one can only be at peace and faithful, when they are at peace with others. Additionally, to this, Duffy includes lexical choices which primarily link to the semantic field of faith. Lexis such as ‘faithless’, ‘hearts’ and ‘prayer’ are included by the poet to continuously remind readers throughout the poem to acknowledge their opinion of faith and suggest that having faith is in every aspect of life, mirroring every aspect of the poem.
To conclude, Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy is a poem of dedication towards living a life of faith, and with peace. Despite not living a religious lifestyle, Duffy is essentially encouraging her readers to break the routine and acknowledge their faith, even for just one moment a day. Through many different foregrounded features such as phonology, prosody, and graphology, Duffy is able to demonstrate that the one way to remain faithful, is being as peace with yourself and others.