Faith Healing

• Summary

  • Describes procession of women who pray with faith healer & are subjected to new torrent of emotions
  • Begins with speaker describing women making way to priest.
  • Each only allowed 20 seconds of contact before moved away
  • Does not seem to matter to women who are emotionally overturned by experience
  • They are unable to comprehend what happened. Contemplate God, love & life they have lived up until this point
• Form & Structure

  • 3 stanzas, separated§ into sets of 10 lines
  • Consistent rhyme scheme - ABCABDABCD
  • Standard meter used
  • Iambic pentameter meaning that each line contains 5 sets of ten beats. Creates regular pattern reminiscent of repetition of prayer
• Themes

  • Skepticism & Disillusionment
  • Isolation & Alienation
  • Search for Meaning
  • Human Vulnerability
  • Irony & Ambivalence
  • Critique of religious institutions
  • Nature of Healing
• Links to Larkin Poems

  • The Whitsun Weddings
  • Anne Hathaway
  • In Mrs Tilscher's Class
• Links to Larkin Poems

  • Love Songs in Age
  • An Arundel Tomb
  • The Whitsun Weddings
  • Wild Oats
• Links to Duffy Poems

  • Welltread
  • First Love
  • The Way My Mother Speaks
  • Valentine
• "Slowly the women file to where he stands"
• "rimless glasses, silver hair, dark suit, white collar"
• "stewards tirelessly persuades them onwards to his voice & hands within those warm spring rain of loving care each dwells some twenty seconds"
• "now, dear child, what's wrong, the deep American voice demands"
• "scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer directing God about this eye, that knee"
• "Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled like losing thoughts, they go in silence"
• "some sheepishly stray, not back into their lives just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching & loud with deep hoarse tears"
• "dumb & idiot child within them still survives to re-awake at kindness"
• "thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd of huge unheard answers jam & rejoice"
• "in everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love"
• "to some it means the difference they could make by loving others, but across most it sweeps as all they might have done had they been loved"
• "that nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, as when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, spreads slowly through them"
• "that, and the voice above saying 'Dear child,' and all time has disproved"