‘Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.’ ( T. S. Eliot ‘Animula’)
- Think about your own associations with prayer and the spirit of connection.
- What is an epiphany?
The influential hypnotherapist Milton Erickson once suggested:
‘And I want you to choose some time in the past when you were …very, very little…And my voice will go with you. And my voice will change into that of your parents, your neighbors, your friends, your school mates, your playmates, your teachers. And I want you to find yourself sitting in the school room, …feeling happy about something, something that happened a long time ago, that your forgot a long time ago.’
- Reading Carol Ann Duffy’s sonnet ‘Prayer’ has a very very soothing effect on me personally and takes me to places and spaces of my experience that console despite the sense of overriding loss that haunts the surfaces and depths of the poem.
- The sonnet itself is a very traditional and formal form, often concerned with reflection and here Duffy’s ‘faithless’ secular ‘Prayer’ seems to create the very thing that it suggests is lost: connection.
- We are aware of the residual need for spiritual intimacy and even transcendence. We are aware that the identity and shape of one’s faith may be unconventional but nevertheless, real.
1) Read the poem by yourself and notice what happens as you read and where you go with the poem and how you experience its sounds. Are the sounds more meaningful than the local meaning? Why?
2) Do the apparent contradictions in the poem paradoxically allow us to explore areas of our existence sometimes overwhelmed by the rational?
IN GROUPS
Each group will be assigned one aspect/area of the poem to discuss. Mind map your group’s reactions to your ‘kernel’ from the poem!
a) ‘Some days’ and ‘Some nights’. ‘Faithless’.
b) ‘Sieve of her hands’.
c) ‘we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself.’
d) The last couplet. Is it a litany?
e) The characters in the poem. What do they have in common?
f) What is the most important sense in the poem? Explore examples. Can you hear the ‘ay’ sound throughout?