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.
Symbols & Motifs
Prayer
For centuries, human beings have prayed to divinities, or “deit[ies]” (Line 10). A prayer can be a meditation on life, an expression of gratitude, or supplication to a god or other object of worship. Gioia’s poem captures all these ideas. The first stanza contains a meditation on the passage of time, and the speaker addresses the nature of fate when they describe the Divine as the “choreographer / of exits and entrances” (Lines 7-8). The second stanza expresses the speaker’s gratitude for what is beautiful in the world. When the speaker requests aid from the Divine—asking it to “watch over” (Line 14) their deceased child with the sincere hope that that entity will protect “him” (Line 14)—they compare it to the natural way a “mountain” (Line 15) or a “harsh falcon” (Line 16) protects what is precious. This ties back to the ideas of gratitude expressed earlier in the poem. As a Catholic, Gioia uses the title “Prayer” to help express the multiplicity of the speaker’s experience with the Divine.
The Scythe in the Sky
In “Prayer,” Death—or the Divine—is described as a “blade of lightning / harvesting the sky” (Lines 5-6). This suggests a sickle shape made by the bolt in the sky, which would be physically beautiful. It also brings the poem’s focus back to death and provides a transition into how Death is personified as the “[k]eeper of the small gate” (Line 7). Traditional personifications of Death are often a skeletal figure in a black robe and carrying a scythe, a tool made up of a long pole and topped with a sickle-shaped blade. In life, the scythe is an agricultural tool for harvesting wheat. Symbolically, the scythe is used by Death to sever the soul from the body before guiding it to the afterlife. The image of the “lightning / harvesting the sky” evokes mortality without being explicit.
Late Night Whispering
In their many descriptions, the speaker calls the Divine a “midnight / whisper travelling the wires” (Line 9), an image holding complex and diverse symbolism. This suggests that fate could come at any time, even in sleep, a thought reiterating the “[e]cho of the clocktower” (Line 1). The midnight setting also symbolizes death (as night traditionally does). On the most immediate and literal level, the image suggests telephone calls—whether to doctors or family—after the “exit” (Line 9) of the loved one. This “whisper” is the hushed voices of those around the deceased as they spread news of the death or pay tribute. On an analogical level, however, a phone call mirrors the action of prayer as a mortal reaches out to contact the divine. Further, the image almost imperceptibly mimics the translation of a person’s soul into the afterlife; after a person dies, their soul is but a disembodied whisper traveling along transcendent wires from the mortal sphere into eternity.
