Summary
The third stanza begins with a straightforward command: "Pray for us now." It's not clear who is being addressed here—maybe the speaker is exhorting the reader to pray, or maybe it's just an expression of the speaker's desire for prayer. Then we hear a few more examples of the type of informal prayer the speaker wants to articulate. First, they list the sound of a child practicing piano scales. These scales help comfort a lodger, or boarder, who is looking out at a town in the Midlands (the central stretch of England). At dusk, someone calls out a child's name, but it sounds "as though they had named their loss"—that is, even as they call out for a living person, their voice is reminiscent of someone mourning or commemorating a loss.
Analysis
The command that comes at the start of this stanza hits us suddenly. No longer meditative and musing, this line is plaintive and direct, with a hint of desperation. It even implicates the reader, since it carries the possibility that the speaker is begging the reader for a prayer. The line "Pray for us now" also echoes a line from the Hail Mary, a Catholic prayer. The original prayer's line is "pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death." Here, Duffy keeps the bare bones of that well-known line, but cuts out the word "sinners" as well as the segment "and at the hour of our death." In doing so, she makes the line more urgent, removing some of the specifically Catholic-sounding words and phrases to streamline and universalize the command. The directness of this moment makes prayer—however it is defined—seem essential, and makes its absence seem frightening and dangerous. The speaker implies that, while something like the "chanting of a train" might seem superfluous to some, it's not. This type of prayer is of great importance, the speaker implies, and it's needed right now.
In this stanza, there are two examples of prayer found in the world rather than just one. This might not seem like a big difference, but it is twice the number in the previous two stanzas, and these examples are squeezed into a small amount of space. This creates the impression of an accelerating rush of images. For the reader, it feels as if there's suddenly an abundance of prayerful moments in everyday life. Not only that, but the two examples in this stanza are more modest than the previous ones. They don't come from the natural world or from industrial machinery. Instead, they come from individual, relatively powerless people. The piano scales are played by a child (or at least are the kind of scales typically played by a small child). The voice calling a child's name is just that—a single person's voice. Not only can moments of prayer arise at any time, in unexpected ways, the speaker indicates, but any person may be unconsciously uttering a prayer while going about their everyday life.
The two examples in this stanza—the piano scales and the child's name—are tied together because both are produced by individual humans. But in another sense they're quite different, and the casual, conversational manner in which Duffy lists them actually makes it easy to ignore this difference. In the first example, one person plays the piano, and another person is consoled by hearing it. In this case, the person who utters the prayer is entirely different from the person who actually hears it and experiences it as a prayer. However, the person who calls the child's name doesn't create a moment of prayerfulness for anybody else. Instead, as they call the name, they simultaneously evoke somebody or something that they have lost. Maybe the child is named after a lost loved one, and maybe the connection is more metaphorical, but regardless, the name-caller here is both the speaker and the beneficiary of their own prayer. Their prayer is more like the kind uttered at a vigil or funeral—it's a way for them to meditate on their own life and loss. Thus, in this stanza, Duffy makes clear that prayer (whether of the explicitly religious variety or of the everyday variety) can serve a variety of purposes. It can be a way to connect with and help others, a way to marvel at the natural world, or a way to commemorate losses.
