18 pages • 36 minutes read
Dana GioiaPrayer
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
A Caregiver’s Love and Protection
Dedicated to Gioia’s deceased son, “Prayer” is about the poet’s deep parental love, but—as the poet himself has suggested in interviews—the emotions portrayed have a potentially universal quality that may speak to any caregiver.
The poem creates an intermingled irony and pathos in its portrayal of the caregiver—the speaker—as feeling so helpless. Caregivers are figures of power, yet in suffering this loss, the speaker appears almost as small and helpless as the child they’re grieving. They acknowledge that the “choreographer / of entrances and exits” (Lines 7-8) is all-powerful and that they cannot change its fateful decisions, and it is revealed that the “him” (Line 14) at the end of the poem has already met Death, the “deity or thief” (Line 10). In the comparison of “him” (Line 14) to a “flightless” (Line 16) bird, the age of the deceased is implied, even if the reader is unaware of the poem’s autobiographical context. The speaker grieves for the loss, knowing that they are helpless “until” (Line 14) their own passing; they can only “pray” (Line 14) to the ruler of the afterlife to “watch over” (Line 14) their deceased loved one. The speaker asks the “keeper” (Line 7) to serve as a surrogate caregiver, to secure the child as the “falcon [would] its flightless young” (Line 16). They also ask the deity to serve as a “mountain [that] guards its covert ore” (Line 15), suggesting that the child’s preciousness and need for security. With these references, the speaker acknowledges they can no longer serve as the earthly caregiver, therefore they “pray” (Line 14) the Divine can take over. This suggests that the speaker’s love for their child transcends death and is perhaps even eternal as they entrust their child to the Divine.
Grief and Perception
“Prayer” illustrates how the world can be perceived after a great loss. When suffering an intense and unexpected loss, one can perceive the world alternately as covered over, as if it’s in a fog, or surprisingly beautiful. There can be a shock in realizing the outside world may not correlate with one’s inner life. The speaker’s thoughts reflect this range of emotion—from isolation and disconnection, to appreciation for the world’s beauty, to anger at the Divine who seems a “thief” (Line 10).
The speaker deeply feels the “[e]cho of the clocktower” (Line 1), or the passing of time, and is aware of the rustling “leaves” (Line 3). The first stanza’s imagery suggests that grief follows the speaker like a “footstep in the alleyway” (Line 2). The speaker, however, is also in awe of how the Divine creates beauty. It is the “jeweller of the spiderweb” (Line 4) and loves “autumn’s opulence” (Line 5). Even the “blade of lightning” (Line 5) that cuts through the sky is both frightening and glorious. The speaker knows that the Divine is the “choreographer” (Line 7) who creates life’s dance and its arbitrary “exits and entrances” (Line 8). In the poem, the Divine—the source of both life and death, creation and destruction—can be described as a “[s]educer, healer, deity or thief” (Line 10). As they contend with their loss, the speaker must grapple with this agonized complexity of the world and of their own perception.
Eventually, in a moment of acceptance, the speaker offers up a “prayer” to that which has taken their loved one. Their grief somewhat subsides as they assume that the Divine will take care of the deceased as asked. While the speaker acknowledges they cannot predict how or when someone’s time will be up, they take it on faith that the Divine is protective. This gives them a way to move past their grief.
The Transitory Nature of Life
One of this poem’s themes appears explicitly in another of Gioia’s poems, “The Gods of Winter” (the title poem of the collection “Prayer” is in). Its speaker states that “our life together” (Line 7) was the “briefest of joys” (Line 7), which was “no more permanent / for being perfect” (Lines 9-10). It is this sense of impermanence that also drives “Prayer” and is conveyed by its metaphors. Time, and its passing, is a central concern shown most vividly in the first stanza, which is composed of images of temporality and movement:
Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves (Lines 1-3).
The world around the speaker is filled with ephemeral things that move and shift, like the fragile “spiderweb” (Line 4); “autumn’s opulence” (Line 5), which changes with the season; and the flash of “lightning” (Line 5) that arrives and is gone. Later in the poem, neither “rainfall” (Line 12) nor “sunset” (Line 13) last. The latter especially contains just a “brief violet” (Line 13) color before it descends to darkness.
The speaker, acutely aware of this mutability, knows that by contrast, when Death does come for them, the stoppage will be as permanent as it was for the child the speaker has lost. The afterlife for the speaker is more permanent than the earthly realm, and the images of movement are replaced with solidity: The “mountain guards its covert ore” (Line 15) that lies unseen, and the “harsh falcon” (Line 16) stands sentinel over “its flightless young” (Line 16).
