Summary
Now, the speaker says, it is dark out. They describe a radio playing inside, uttering a prayer of its own. The "prayer" is simply the words "Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre." These four words reference the four "weather areas" surrounding the British Isles, routinely announced as part of nighttime "shipping broadcasts" in the U.K. While the sounds may be meaningless to some readers, U.K. residents of Duffy's generation will likely find these words familiar.
Analysis
At the end of the poem, its form becomes clear. This final stanza is very different from the previous ones. While the first three were four-line stanzas, or quatrains, this one is only two lines—also known as a couplet. And while the other stanzas followed an ABAB rhyme scheme, the two lines of this stanza rhyme. This means the poem has 14 lines, composed of three quatrains and one couplet, with an ABAB CDCD EFEF AA rhyme scheme. A poem that follows this form is called a Shakespearian sonnet (as opposed to the somewhat different Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet). Sonnets are traditionally written in iambic pentameter, though Duffy takes some liberties with her meter, altering the poem's rhythm to create a feeling of spontaneity and naturalness. One other thing that differentiates this sonnet from others is the final "AA" rhyme: a sonnet's final couplet usually involves a brand-new rhyme, while this one repeats the very first rhyme in the poem. The most important part of a Shakespearian sonnet is the transition from the final quatrain to the couplet. Not only does the form of the poem shift here, but its content undergoes a shift as well. This transitional, pivotal moment in a sonnet is called a volta, which means "turn." So what turns between the twelfth and thirteen lines of "Prayer"? In other words, why did Duffy choose to write this particular poem as a sonnet, rather than in another form?
One answer is that the couplet—the part of the poem that comes after the volta—is basically a compressed, or intensified, version of the three previous stanzas. It cuts away extra analysis and explanation, no longer describing prayer (in the broad definition that Duffy here uses) but instead actually repeating a prayer (according to the expanded definition of prayer the poem advocates) within the poem itself. In other words, in the final couplet, the line between what the poem describes, and what the poem itself is, collapses, turning the poem itself into a prayerful refrain. The person praying is no longer a character in the poem, but is instead the reader. How does Duffy engineer this collapse between describing an experience and actually creating it?
In each of the three previous stanzas, Duffy has used full sentences to convey scenes, describing a character who encounters or creates a prayer in their everyday life. Here, there is no character, and Duffy rejects the use of full sentences. Instead, she paints a vivid but simple portrait of a scene, with a dark outside world and a contained inside. By choosing not to describe a character in this space, Duffy allows the reader to imagine themselves within the scene. The reader in a sense becomes a character within the poem. Next, instead of describing a prayer through imagery, as she has previously (through phrases like "the minims sung by a tree" and "Grade 1 piano scales") Duffy simply transcribes the text of the prayer directly onto the page. We actually read the words "Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre," experiencing them in real time, just as if we ourselves were sitting inside and listening to the radio broadcast.
One of the functions of prayer, as Duffy articulates it, is that it can be transporting, taking people out of their immediate circumstances and allowing them to connect with the natural world, other people, or even other moments in time. By directly transcribing the words of a prayer into the poem itself, Duffy takes the reader out of their own circumstances, taking them in a very literal way to another time, place, and mood. This means that we can think of the first three stanzas of this poem as a kind of argument, asserting a given point—namely, that sensory experiences in the secular world can have spiritual or religious elements. The fourth stanza, though, is no longer an argument but a kind of demonstration, proving the point that the first three stanzas have made by actually forcing the reader to undergo one of these sensory experiences. The fact that the sonnet ends with an "AA" rhyme, rather than introducing a new "G" rhyme, makes sense in this context. By having her poem's first line rhyme with its final word, Duffy indicates that the final couplet brings the poem full circle—and indeed it does, because the final couplet is a way of showing what the first line tells.
