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

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The alternative nterpretation would not have occurred to me. These people hear something transcending in everyday sounds. And I love the idea of the shipping forecast being a prayer; because that ritual is comforting and reassuring to so many people without meaning anything.