Most prayers ask for something. Stevenson's begins by admitting that the person asking can't be trusted to ask properly. In five tidy quatrains the speaker confesses that his words and his heart are at odds, and that neither gives God anything reliable to work with. By the end he has handed over nearly everything: his words, his actions, his thoughts, even his wishes.
The cleverest move comes in the first two stanzas, which are built as mirror images. In the first, the speaker asks for "good things that I detest." He knows what a good person ought to want and says it "with speeches fair," but he doesn't feel it. So he begs God to ignore his "breast" (his inner feelings) and "hear my prayer." In the second stanza the situation flips. Now his tongue slips into "ill things I would not say," and he pleads, "Regard my breast... / And not my prayer." The same two words swap places, and the rhyme repeats too, since both stanzas end on "prayer." First the words are better than the heart, then the heart is better than the words. The speaker can find no fixed point in himself to stand on. Readers who know Stevenson's *Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* may sense a family likeness, a self that won't hold together. Here, though, the division is met with humility rather than horror.
Stanza three is the low point and the hinge. "My heart is evil in Thy sight: / My good thoughts flee." The verb makes good thoughts sound like frightened animals bolting. Then comes the poem's most startling request: "I cannot wish aright - / Wish Thou for me." He doesn't ask for what he wants, or even to be made to want the right things. He asks God to do his wanting for him. Prayer is stripped down to bare dependence.
The form supports this. Every stanza rhymes ABAB, with long lines of eight syllables in a steady iambic beat alternating with short lines of four. The pattern feels like a breath taken and quickly spent: "Heed not, I pray Thee, Lord, my breast, / But hear my prayer." The short lines carry the punches: "Wish Thou for me," "May serve Thee still," "Lest I should fall." The vocabulary is plain and mostly one-syllable, with no ornament, which suits a speaker who has just admitted he distrusts his own "speeches fair." The only old-fashioned touches are the forms of address (Thee, Thy, Thou) and words like "whate'er" and "aright."
Stanza four turns from confession to hope. "O bend my words and acts to Thee" is a gentle image. "Bend" suggests a branch or a bow, something flexible being redirected rather than snapped. "However ill" concedes that the material is poor. The stanza ends on "still," which means both "even so" and "without stopping." The speaker will serve whatever he says or is, and he will keep serving. He no longer needs to be good, only usable.
The last stanza shifts the grammar. Until now the poem is crowded with *I*, *my* and *me*. In the closing lines the attention lifts outward: "Show me Thyself in all I see, / Thou Lord of all." The rhyme completes the thought, because the fear of the stanza ("Lest I should fall") is answered by its final word, "all." If God is visible in everything, the self no longer has to be the centre of the struggle.
The poem matters for its honesty. It doesn't pretend to piety, and it makes the unreliability of our own motives its subject. You don't need to share Stevenson's faith to recognise the experience of saying one thing, feeling another, and regretting both. That a poem this short, in such simple words, can hold such a tangled psychology is part of its achievement.