- Genre: dramatic poetry; subgenre – prayer.
- Subject: prayer to God of the atheist; theme – contradiction between reason and faith.
- Diction: concrete irony (cosmic); onomatopoeia style: colloquial.
- Medium: narrative.
- Parts: two quatrains and two tercets.
- Rhythm (stress/pause) or Prosody: iambic/ trochaic/ dactylic/ anapaest/ spondee meter
- Rhyme/rime: enclosed rhyme (abba) and terza rima (aba, abb).
- Form: Closed; sonnet; poem; visual poetry.
Persona (mask) and point-of-view: In the poem, the atheist – and it seems that this is Unamuno’s literary “mask” – says, “I remember calming fables, so quaint, Recited when nights of sadness would insist” (Unamuno 1). Unamuno wants to claim that human consciousness appeals to God in times when it cannot find answers to questions of being when there is nothing but sorrow within us. The author claimed the individual and existential essence of philosophic truths, discrepancies between science and spiritual progression, and the revival of the person as the only path out of the impasse of this world. The pivotal aspect of the poem is the spiritual existence of an individual, which is founded on the aspiration to solve the discrepancies between mortality and immortality. It might be said that Unamuno’s poem The Prayer of the Atheist stays in line with his philosophy.
Tone: It seems clear that the author aims to give a dramatic mood to the poem. He puts an emphasis on the tragic within the scope of human existence – despite the fact that people aspire to be immortal in the religious sense, their intellects say that it is impossible. The outcome of such a contradiction the feeling of inevitable grief and sorrow, which is embodied in firm language of reason and science. The narrator apparently regrets about the fact that God does not exists, and it is not possible to live forever as it could be, “Nonexistent God, if thou were to exist, I too, perhaps, would be able to persist” (Unamuno 1).
•magery: Auditory – “Hear thou my prayer”; “calming fables” (Unamuno 1);
Figures of speech: “Hear thou my prayer, oh God who does not exist” (Unamuno 1). Here, Unamuno draws an antithesis as the idea of God with the atheistic vision that this God is nothing but fiction are encountered.
Antithesis seems to be the primary figure of speech used throughout the poem as in this writing, the essence of reason and faith are clashed.
Works Cited
Valero, Celma. “Miguel de Unamuno, Poeta Simbolista.” Anales de Literatura Española, núm. 15, 2002, pp. 93–107.
Unamuno, Miguel. “The Atheist Prayer.”entremundos.byu.edu, Web.