eye_of_a_cat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2008-10-30 04:54 pm
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2008-10-30 04:54 pm
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Your thoughts on a poem?
This is behind f-lock as a precaution because I'm teaching it at the moment, but it's not just the students whose interpretations aren't matching mine at the moment. The poem is Carol Ann Duffy's 'Prayer':
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
(The 'radio's prayer', if you're unfamiliar with the names, is the BBC late-night shipping forecast.)
Many of my students, and several of the other TAs, read the 'prayers' talked about here - the ones uttering themselves - as actual prayers spoken/thought by those individuals, even if subconsciously. So the birds singing in the tree, the Latin chanting of the train, and so on, are then answers to the prayers. I read it the other way around: the people aren't praying, but the sounds they hear are still 'prayers'. I'm curious because the only TA who read it the same way I did the first time round is Catholic (as am I, and as is the poet) - is it a Catholic thing, with Catholics typically having more of a concept of communal, ritualised prayer than Protestants?
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
(The 'radio's prayer', if you're unfamiliar with the names, is the BBC late-night shipping forecast.)
Many of my students, and several of the other TAs, read the 'prayers' talked about here - the ones uttering themselves - as actual prayers spoken/thought by those individuals, even if subconsciously. So the birds singing in the tree, the Latin chanting of the train, and so on, are then answers to the prayers. I read it the other way around: the people aren't praying, but the sounds they hear are still 'prayers'. I'm curious because the only TA who read it the same way I did the first time round is Catholic (as am I, and as is the poet) - is it a Catholic thing, with Catholics typically having more of a concept of communal, ritualised prayer than Protestants?
no subject
to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, I'd never have gone to the other TAs' interpretation of the birds, train etc as answers to prayers. I had to reread it three times and squint to try to see it that way, and I'm still not sure I understand that reading.That's a beautiful poem, incidentally. I'd never come across it before.