Prayer is supposed to be the point of a poem called "Nova Scotia Vespers," yet the speaker admits in the first few lines that she has lost the habit: "Five days. / Already I've forgotten / how to pray." Vespers is an evening service, a fixed ritual of words, and what replaces it here is a stretch of time at the edge of the sea. The poem's central idea is that attention to the natural world can crowd out language, including the language of religion. Whether that counts as a loss or as a different kind of worship is something Pratt leaves open.
The poem opens with a countdown, "Five days," and the word "Already" gives the forgetting a faintly comic, guilty speed. Prayer is something she has lost almost as soon as she has left her routine. What fills the gap is sensory. Her "nose full of dust and salt" and "ears full of silence" set up a pattern of fullness that returns in the second stanza. Even silence is something she is full of, as though it were a substance she had breathed in. The next line, "boats, birds," is two plain nouns with a hard, repeated *b*, and it sounds like a list made by someone too relaxed to build a sentence.
The strangest image comes next: "The sea is grey crayon lines on the sky." The sea is not under the sky, as we would expect, but drawn onto it, flattened like a child's picture. A crayon suggests simplicity and a beginner's vocabulary. A speaker who has "forgotten how to pray" also seems to have forgotten how to describe things in grown-up terms. The comparison makes sense of the poem's mood, because language has shrunk to what a child could manage.
Then the poem lifts. "Yesterday when I was looking, a right whale / leapt all out of the water, / a plume of foam / with dolphins dancing high around." This is the longest sentence in the poem and the only one with real motion. The earlier lines are static, full of dust, silence and grey lines, and here everything jumps. "Leapt all out of the water" has a breathless, slightly unpolished quality, as if she were telling a friend. The alliteration in "plume of foam" and "dolphins dancing high" makes the sound itself seem to splash. The word "dancing" hints at celebration, even a kind of liturgy performed by animals while the human watcher forgets her own. It is also telling that she says "when I was looking." She is not seeking the whale. It appears because she is paying attention.
The second stanza turns inward and changes the poem's rhythm. Three lines in the same pattern follow: "I have eaten too many fish / drunk too much wine / watched too many hours in the sun." The repetition of "too many" and "too much" sounds like a confession, which suits a poem named after a service. But it is a strange confession, since the sins are pleasures. The last of them, "watched too many hours in the sun," is slightly off grammatically. We watch things, not hours, so the line suggests time itself has become something she looks at passively. The speaker has been consuming food, drink, light and hours, and she is full to the point of surfeit.
The punctuation fades as well. The first stanza still has full stops and commas. The second has none, and the poem ends on "no words," with no verb and no full stop. It is hard to say whether these two words are an apology, a complaint or a quiet satisfaction. Read one way, too much appetite has emptied her of speech. Read another, the whale and the dolphins have given her something that words would only spoil. The poem's own brevity supports the second reading, since it does not try to explain the experience.
Pratt uses no rhyme and no regular meter, only short, uneven lines that follow the pace of someone speaking quietly. That plainness gives the poem its force. In a handful of lines it shows how a religious habit can give way to something closer to wonder, and it does so without claiming to know which is better.