Secular Prayers

Carol Ann Duffy was announced as the new Poet Laureate this month, to replace Andrew Motion after he had completed his ten years in office. Apparently he has suffered writer’s block for four of those, because of the pressure to gush forth on such uninspiring pretexts as a royal wedding. Nonetheless, he does not regret accepting the post and believes it has given him the opportunity to raise the profile of poetry in the public eye. Duffy is a Laureate for our time one suspects. She is the first woman to be appointed since the post began over three hundred years ago, and her openly gay stance may perhaps make a few folk sit up and listen just to see if she has anything shocking to say. I have not read enough of her work to ascertain her religious sensibilities, but I was interested to hear her state that poems were ‘secular prayers’ in a recent interview. Indeed she wrote a deeply contemplative sonnet in 1993 called ‘Prayer,’ which was part of a collection based around the theme of ending a relationship. I came across it some while ago and, like all great verse, it went straight to the heart.

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 I 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 poem has a music which takes you beyond the logical mind, just as the most potent prayers are able to do. It has the small but perfectly formed frame of a sonnet, and a simple, almost child-like rhyme scheme which gives it a gentle liturgical lilt. Indeed ‘pray for us now’ is a fragment from a well known Catholic prayer to Mary, and even the place names of the shipping forecast in the final line are made to sound like a solemn chant from the divine offices of night. Moreover the poem itself illuminates the litany of sounds which weave in and out of our conscious mind through the course of each day calling us to prayer. There is ‘the distant Latin chanting of a train,’ the ‘Grade I piano scales,’ the calling for a child and ‘the radio’s prayer’ reaching into the lonely rain swept islands. Even the trees may sing to us when we most need their consolation. Whether intentionally or not, Carol Ann Duffy has celebrated the ceaseless prayer which ripples from the centre of everyday life. It ‘utters itself’ as a ‘sudden gift’ and consoles ‘the lodger looking out across a Midland town.’ These ‘prayers’ somehow illuminate the ‘darkness’ for the characters in the poem. This darkness is experienced as sorrow, regret, and loneliness and it is this, which prevents them from praying in the first place. Perhaps she calls this and other poems secular prayers, because they capture the experience of people finding faith or hope or comfort from within the ordinary rather than sacred spheres of existence; or perhaps because Carol Ann Duffy does not share a particular religious persuasion. Either way, this brilliant and worthy poet Laureate has understood more than most, that the essence of prayer is not so much something we choose to do, but it is rather received unexpectedly as a ‘sudden gift.’ May she speak to the heart of our nation in these dark days of recession.