TH

THE PRAYER SEEKER

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

It

HIS poem appears in the author's collection of religious poems and gives the last word of the Quaker poet on the subject of prayer. The poem was written in 1870 when Whittier was 63 years of age and five years after he wrote The Eternal Goodness. is the product of his ripened religious experience, an interpretation of his profoundest religious philosophy. Whittier has given no clue as to the origin of the poem, but it is doubtless founded on the custom, in vogue in his day, which permitted church goers to pass to the sacred desk and place thereon requests for prayers during the sacred hour of prayer. Some asked prayers for favorable weather and bountiful harvest; some, for the healing of the sick; mothers asked prayers for wayward boys; gray-haired fathers, for the safe return of their soldier sons; and many requested prayers for the salvation of a friend or loved one. In this instance, an unknown woman veiled and in black glided softly to the sacred desk while the worshipers were quietly kneeling, and placed thereon a scroll with the simple request "Pray for me," then back into the night, leaving no suggestion of the nature of the burden she bore. Whittier recognizes in the simple legend the clear expression of the sense of personal need, and sympathy with the world of need. He utters the universal request, "Pray for us." The poem clearly sets forth that prayer is

an attitude of the soul in which it seeks not to know the specific miseries of others but to realize "that every heart hath needs like these."

THE PRAYER SEEKER*

Along the aisle where prayer was made,
A woman, all in black arrayed,
Close-veiled, between the kneeling host,
With gliding motion of a ghost,
Passed to the desk, and laid thereon
A scroll which bore these words alone,
Pray for me!

Back from the place of worshipping
She glided like a guilty thing:
The rustle of her draperies, stirred
By hurrying feet, alone was heard;
While, full of awe, the preacher read,
As out into the dark she sped:

Pray for me!

Back to the night from whence she came,
To unimagined grief or shame!

Across the threshold of that door

None knew the burden that she bore;

Alone she left the written scroll,

The legend of a troubled soul,-
Pray for me!

Glide on, poor ghost of woe or sin!

Thou leav'st a common need within;

Each bears, like thee, some nameless weight,

Some misery inarticulate,

Some secret sin, some shrouded dread,

Some household sorrow all unsaid.

Pray for us!

* Used by the courteous permission of the publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company.

Pass on! The type of all thou art,
Sad witness to the common heart!
With face in veil and seal on lip,
In mute and strange companionship,
Like thee we wander to and fro,
Dumbly imploring as we go:
Pray for us!

Ah! who shall pray, since he who pleads
Our want perchance hath greater needs?
Yet they who make their loss the gain
Of others shall not ask in vain,

And Heaven bends low to hear the prayer
Of love from lips of self-despair:
Pray for us!

In vain, remorse and fear and hate
Beat with bruised hands against a gate
Whose walls of iron only move

And open to the touch of love.

He only feels his burden fall

Who, taught by suffering, pities all.
Pray for us!

He prayeth best who leaves unguessed
The mystery of another's breast;

Why cheeks grow pale, why eyes o'erflow,
Or heads are white, thou need'st not know.
Enough to note by many a sign

That every heart hath needs like thine.
Pray for us!

SUGGESTIVE EXERCISES

1. Give clearly the incident upon which the poem is based.

2. What was the simple request made?

3. Why should the preacher be "full of awe"?

4. What at least could the preacher infer concerning the un

known visitor?

5. Why does Whittier say "The type of all thou art"?

6. Explain "Sad witness to the common heart."

7. Why does the author change the personal pronoun to the plural form?

8. Explain fully the meaning of "self-despair."

9. What answer would you give to the question in stanza 6? 10. Under what conditions does the author declare that burdens may fall from the heart?

11. Explain the first two lines of the last stanza.

12. What is the ideal attitude of the soul at prayer?

13. What, then, is the larger truth of the poem?

REFERENCES

MASON: The Voyage.

Thy Will Be Done.

WHITTIER: The Eternal Goodness.

The

Brother of Mercy. The Two Angels. Worship of Nature.
Divine Compassion.

WORDSWORTH: The Force of Prayer. The Wishing-Gate.

COLERIDGE: The Ancient Mariner.

POPE: Universal Prayer.

RILEY: God Bless Us Every One. This Dear Child-Hearted

Woman that is Dead.

H. H. JACKSON: Not As I Will.

CHADWICK: Prayer for Unity.

HIGGINSON: The Things I Miss.

ALEXANDER: All Things Bright and Beautiful.

EDNA DEAN CHENEY: The Larger Prayer.

MARGARET DELAND: Life.

BONAR: He Liveth Long Who Liveth Well.

R. W. GILBERT: I Rest in God.

SILL: The Fool's Prayer.
WOTTON: A Happy Life.

LONGFELLOW: Sandalphon.

MRS. HEMANS: The Hour of Prayer.

A

A PSALM OF LIFE

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

YOUNG man has heard some good-hearted but pessimistic brother declaim upon the wickedness and vanity of the "worldly" life, citing the Psalmist in proof, we may imagine as follows:

"Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity." - Psalms 39:5.

"Man is like to vanity, his days are as a shadow that passeth away." - Psalms 144:4.

The young man has also heard the sonorous warning tones of the good brother:

"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Gen. 4:10.

The young man's bosom is filled with hope, love, and enthusiasm as he faces life with its opportunities for heroic action and sublime achievement, and his heart utters a protest against these pessimistic literal halftruths. Longfellow has given in this poem what the heart of the youth declared in protest and has left us to feel that the speaker went forth to follow up his faith with heroic service. This poem was first published in 1838 when Longfellow was thirty-two years of age and doubtless reveals his own warm, enthusiastic interpretation of life as life then appealed to him.

Longfellow himself said of it, "I kept it some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to anyone, it being