Your thoughts on a poem?

[eye_of_a_cat]

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?

Comments

[blackcurrants.livejournal.com]

I read it the way you do. Erm. And am lapsed protestant who went to catholic school. Not sure what that says. But I am surprised that "Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer/utters itself. " is interpreted the way you say your students are reading it. I had never thought of the possibility that the people were praying 'even if subconsciously.' My interpretation is that the poem is about the inability to pray, and how the ritual sounds that are not actually prayers nonetheless offer comfort to these people who 'cannot pray.'
There doesn't seem to be an option for "some days, although we think we cannot pray, we do subconsciously anyway, and then noises sound like responses." That seems to be a bad-faith (sorry) reading, to me.