“A Grace Before Dinner” Blog #12

April 2, 2009 blondie11

For this weeks poetry entry I chose to analyze “A Grace Before Dinner” by Robert Burns.  I chose this poem because first of all, I love reading different dinner prayers.  I write my families prayers every year for dinnertime and I thoroughly enjoy it.  I was very interested to see how a dinner prayer might be arranged during the eighteenth century.  I was quite surprised to notice how short the prayer actually was!  It followed a feminine rhyme scheme but was only consistent every other line.  I feel that this might have been a standard scheme during this time because pretty much every poem I have read rarely keeps the rhyme scheme throughout the whole poem.  The second thing I noticed was how certain words were capitalized.  The words that were capitalized seemed to be all different words used to name God.  For example, “Heavenly Guide” and “God of Nature.”  I feel this was done in order to bring a little more life into the poem/prayer.  Also, I’m wondering if most prayers were written using that technique just because prayers are full of praise and glory and thanks and they use so many different names for God.  There were also quite a few end stops used.  This is used in order to bring to life the pause that most people hear in real prayers.  When you include that type of technique, it makes the poem so much more powerful and meaningful.  This poem really stuck out at me as a true representation of eighteenth century prayer.  I also feel that it reflects modern prayer as well because it fits in as being pretty standard prayer.

Entry Filed under: Senior year

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