In Church

W. B. Yeatsfrom Early and uncollected poems16 lines

She prays for father, mother dear,To Him with thunder shod,She prays for every falling tearIn the holy church of God.

For all good men now fallen ill,For merry men that weep,For holiest teachers of His will,And common men that sleep.

The sunlight flickering on the pews,The sunlight in the air,The flies that dance in threes, in twos,They seem to join her prayer⁠—

Her prayer for father, mother dear,To Him with thunder shod,A prayer for every falling tearIn the holy church of God.

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

A girl prays in a sunlit church, and the scene seems to join her.

A girl in church prays: for her father and mother, for "every falling tear", for the sick, for merry men who weep, for holy teachers and for ordinary people asleep. In the third stanza the view widens to the sunlight flickering on the pews and the flies dancing in the air, which "seem to join her prayer". The last stanza repeats the first, so the poem ends where it began, in the steady rhythm of prayer.

Lines to remember

The flies that dance in threes, in twos,

They seem to join her prayer

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4Her prayer
She prays for her parents and "every falling tear" to a God "with thunder shod", an image of power and majesty. The simple "She prays" and the plain church setting give the stanza the feel of a hymn.
Lines 5 to 8All kinds of people
Her prayer widens to take in the sick, "merry men that weep", "holiest teachers" and "common men that sleep". The list moves from the grand to the ordinary, so that no one is left out.
Lines 9 to 12Sunlight and flies
The one stanza of pure description. Sunlight flickers on the pews and hangs in the air, and flies "dance in threes, in twos". These small, careless things "seem to join her prayer", as if the whole world shared in it.
Lines 13 to 16The prayer again
The first stanza returns almost word for word, changed only to "Her prayer" and "A prayer". The repetition works like a refrain in a hymn and rounds the poem off in quiet.

Themes

Prayer and innocence

The girl's prayer is generous and simple: she asks for others, never for herself. Its list of "father, mother dear", the sick and the sad has the directness of a child's bedtime prayer, and the poem treats it with gentle respect rather than argument.

Nature joining in

The third stanza lets sunlight and dancing flies "seem to join her prayer". The word "seem" is careful, but the effect is to make prayer something the whole scene shares, not only a human act. The tiny flies and the God "with thunder shod" sit in the same small poem.

Context

This is one of Yeats's early poems that he did not keep in his collected work, and our text comes from the Standard Ebooks edition of his poetry. Its details of first publication are not confirmed here. Its simple Christian scene is unusual for Yeats, whose early poems more often turn to Irish legend, fairies and the occult.

Form

Four ballad quatrains rhymed ABAB, with lines of four beats and three beats in turn ("She prays for father, mother dear, / To Him with thunder shod"). This is the metre of many hymns, and the final stanza's repetition of the first gives the poem a closed, circular shape.