Prayer - CAROL ANN DUFFY mindmap

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  • Created by: daltog
  • Created on: 11-02-21 14:50
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  • Prayer
    • Context Poem
      • Explores how in a faithless secular society find comfort in small things that act as metaphorical prayer
      • Not prayer to God but to objects that provide joy and comfort to life
        • LARKIN: Faith Healing
      • Non religious, secular poem, focus on spirituality and the ability of humans to helps and protect each other
      • Prayer resides in the most munane aspects of daily existence in the neglected corners of experience
      • Filmic, cuts to different characters lives
    • Structure
      • Rhythm immaculate the regular patterns of song or the changing of prayer
        • Supported by the semantic field of music - "minims", "sung", "chanting"
      • Whole poem acts as a form of prayer
      • Rhythm, tone, phonological feature - alliteration consonance, assonance
      • Shakespeare sonnet
        • 14 lines
          • 3 quatrains and a rhyming couplet
            • alternating rhymes abab, cdcd, efef (rhyming couplet gg)
            • Echos the final line in the first a- prayer and g- finisterre
        • Comes from sonnetto - meaning little sound or song
      • Created a cyclical structure that mirrors the poems theme of renewal
      • Secular version of the conventional religious prayer
    • Faith and Doubt in modern life
      • Presents scenes from modern society in which people to struggle with finding traditional reglious faith
      • Illustrates how some form of spirituality may often emerge unexpectedly from most familiar aspects of daily life
      • Suggests that people can offer their own kind of spiritual comfort (links to Faith Healing)
      • Describes contemporary society - trains, radios, grade schools marked by despair, isolation and a distinct absence of traditional faith
        • Links to 'Water' - Larkin
      • Locates the mystical or numinous experiences towards our everyday lives
      • Duffy speaks for the secular community and represents this group through the unknown people "a women a man, the lodger
      • Contemplates just how in the lack of organised religion, comfort can instead be seen in the normal, prosaic events
      • Duffy included herself by the use of the pronouns "we" and "us"
      • "At the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift" - Images with religious undertones show how spiritual experiences can be found in a increasingly circular (non religious) society
    • Religion and Quotes
      • Latin lessons - associated with Christianity by Latin mass
        • But the memory is of learning the language not necessarily in the context of Catholicism
      • Spiritual even though they are grounded in more secular and everyday routines and situations
      • Absence of religion "although we cannot pray" and "although we" are faithless
      • "We" conveys these people are are part of the collective in the poem illustrating that these individuals are experiencing  kind of deep loneliness in their daily lives - connection to people's inability to find faith and the sense of comfort, consolation such faith might offer in the modern world
      • "We cannot pray"/"sometime times … a prayer utters itself" and "the truth/ enters our hearts" - suggests that though many people have lost touch with or deliberately distanced themselves from traditional religious practices (they still experience a sense of spiritual comfort and connection via the surroundings world itself
        • Links to Faith Healing and Water due to companionship and the society in which we live in
      • Images with religious undertones show how spiritual experiences can be found in an increasingly circular society - hearing his youth in the distant Latin chanting of a train
      • This is a more uplifting poem about religion which appear to look at religion as something that you can turn your back on, but which at certain times will still bring you comfort and joy. There is a peacefulness about this pome
      • Themes: Religion, Deceit, Hope, Faith, Relationship
      • "Grade 1 piano scales" - repetive, comforting
      • "Lodger" no sense of belonging
      • "Named their loss" bereavement, reminded of the loss of their youth/ someone from youth
      • Contrast of outside/ inside in stanza 3
      • Prayers are repeated calls, things we return to, things we iterate and reiterate just as the Shipping Forecast is repeated at regular intervals every night on BBC radio, soothing, feeling of being grounded only in Britain
      • "Finisterre" means "the end of the earth" nothing beyond this life/ no spiritual world or afterlife
      • Sibilance of s' - "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"
      • "We are faithless"
        • "Pray for us now"
          • Similarity to 'Confession' with "Bless me Father" or "Mother of God"
    • Context
      • Insignificant experience instead turn into a source of consolation for the unknown persona = steam of consciousness
      • Childhood experience of the Catholic practice of Confession
      • Located this form of devotion a frightining repressive expericne
      • Seeks to convey the idea that people without a religious faith can find solace in ordinary everyday experiences
      • "A women is alleviated from her despair and "lifts her head from the sieve of her hands", - upon seeing the beauty in nature "staring at the minims sung by a tree"
    • Imagery
      • "Minims" wind/ bird or a unit of water, ran
        • Water - Larkin (but also biblical reference to Catholicism) however, it could also be interpreted through societies genre of religious expectance and comfort
          • Born into a faith
          • Faith Healing and Confession
      • Parenthesis 'although we are faithless' don't need to be religious to be comforted
      • "Chanting of a train" a man hearing the sound of a train chugging across the landscao is suddenly reminded, unexpectedly, of his childhood and his Latin lessons
      • The overpowering nature of this nostalgic experience is captured by the deployment of an alliteration when the man is forced to stand stock still hearing the sound which is reminiscent of his youthful days, train = metaphor for journey of life
      • Nostalgia - he may have has a faith and lost it
        • Duffy's Catholic upbringing, losing the faith ("us" universally
          • Links to Confession - Duffy's break away from the Catholic Church intertwines with the mans lose of faith
    • Music
      • "Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer" - constellation of music
        • Sombre atmospheric tension
    • Critics
      • Duffy presents disappointed figures in need of comfort in a dark and potentially comfortless world - Cash
      • To inform the reader of the changing social and historical atmosphere of their society - Allem (conveys a change in our society infringes upon peoples perceptions of religion either for comfort or in times of desperate need
      • We see the nostalgia and disaffection of Phillip Larkin within Duffy's poetry (Rees - Jones)

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