The Prayers of God
Read 'The Prayers of God' by 'W. E. B. Du Bois' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
Name of God's Name!
Red murder reigns;
All hell is loose;
On gold autumnal air
Walk grinning devils, barbed and hoofed;
While high on hills of hate,
Black-blossomed, crimson-sky'd,
Thou sittest, dumb.
Father Almighty!
This earth is mad!
Palsied, our cunning hands;
Rotten, our gold;
Our argosies reel and stagger
Over empty seas;
All the long aisles
Of Thy Great Temples, God,
Stink with the entrails
Of our souls.
And Thou art dumb.
Above the thunder of Thy Thunders, Lord,
Lightening Thy Lightnings,
Rings and roars
The dark damnation
Of this hell of war.
Red piles the pulp of hearts and heads
And little children's hands.
Allah!
Elohim!
Very God of God!
Death is here!
Dead are the living; deep—dead the dead.
Dying are earth's unborn—
The babes' wide eyes of genius and of joy,
Poems and prayers, sun-glows and earth-songs,
Great-pictured dreams,
Enmarbled phantasies,
High hymning heavens—all
In this dread night
Writhe and shriek and choke and die
This long ghost-night—
While Thou art dumb.
Have mercy!
Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!
Stand forth, unveil Thy Face,
Pour down the light
That seethes above Thy Throne,
And blaze this devil's dance to darkness!
Hear!
Speak!
In Christ's Great Name—
I hear!
Forgive me, God!
Above the thunder I hearkened;
Beneath the silence, now,—
I hear!
(Wait, God, a little space.
It is so strange to talk with Thee—
Alone!)
This gold?
I took it.
Is it Thine?
Forgive; I did not know.
Blood? Is it wet with blood?
'Tis from my brother's hands.
(I know; his hands are mine.)
It flowed for Thee, O Lord.
War? Not so; not war—
Dominion, Lord, and over black, not white;
Black, brown, and fawn,
And not Thy Chosen Brood, O God,
We murdered.
To build Thy Kingdom,
To drape our wives and little ones,
And set their souls a-glitter—
For this we killed these lesser breeds
And civilized their dead,
Raping red rubber, diamonds, cocoa, gold!
For this, too, once, and in Thy Name,
I lynched a Nigger—
(He raved and writhed,
I heard him cry,
I felt the life-light leap and lie,
I saw him crackle there, on high,
I watched him wither!)
Thou?
Thee?
I lynched Thee?
Awake me, God! I sleep!
What was that awful word Thou saidst?
That black and riven thing—was it Thee?
That gasp—was it Thine?
This pain—is it Thine?
Are, then, these bullets piercing Thee?
Have all the wars of all the world,
Down all dim time, drawn blood from Thee?
Have all the lies and thefts and hates—
Is this Thy Crucifixion, God,
And not that funny, little cross,
With vinegar and thorns?
Is this Thy kingdom here, not there,
This stone and stucco drift of dreams?
Help!
I sense that low and awful cry—
Who cries?
Who weeps?
With silent sob that rends and tears—
Can God sob?
Who prays?
I hear strong prayers throng by,
Like mighty winds on dusky moors—
Can God pray?
Prayest Thou, Lord, and to me?
Thou needest me?
Thou needest me?
Thou needest me?
Poor, wounded soul!
Of this I never dreamed. I thought—
Courage, God,
I come!
The Prayers of God Summary and Analysis
W. E. B. Du Bois presents a crisis of faith set against the horror of war, racial violence, greed, and imperial brutality. The poem begins as a denunciation of a world that seems abandoned by God: the earth is corrupt, human institutions are stained, and the divine appears silent while suffering multiplies. The repeated cries to different names for God create a global, urgent prayer that sounds both desperate and accusatory, as if language itself is trying to force a response from heaven.
The poem then turns inward. What first sounds like a complaint against God becomes an indictment of the human being who speaks. In a dramatic shift, the voice confesses complicity in theft, violence, colonial exploitation, and lynching, and begins to realize that the suffering it has caused may be inseparable from the suffering of God. The central tension is powerful: God seems absent, yet the poem suggests that divine pain is present inside human cruelty. By the end, the speaker moves from accusation to shock, and then to fearful responsibility, recognizing that communion with God may require confronting the wounds humans have inflicted on one another and on the world.
Tone in The Prayers of God
Du Bois's tone is vehement, prophetic, and increasingly self-condemning, blending accusation with awe and repentance. What the reader feels, however, is a mounting sense of dread that gradually gives way to stunned moral clarity. The atmosphere is apocalyptic at first, crowded with fire, blood, and blasphemous force, but it deepens into something more unsettling: the realization that the true horror is not only God's silence, but human beings' readiness to commit cruelty while invoking God's name.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in The Prayers of God
- Divine silence - The poem repeatedly asks why God does not answer, turning silence into a source of terror and spiritual crisis.
- Human guilt and complicity - The speaker's confession reveals that war, theft, racism, and murder are not abstract evils but actions for which human beings must answer.
- Racial violence and oppression - The poem condemns lynching and colonial exploitation as moral crimes carried out under false claims of civilization and divine approval.
- War and mass suffering - Battle is depicted as a worldwide catastrophe that consumes the living, the dead, and even the unborn, leaving no innocent space untouched.
- Spiritual awakening - The speaker moves from outrage to self-recognition, discovering that true prayer requires honesty, repentance, and readiness to change.
- God's suffering and presence - The poem suggests that God is not distant from human pain but somehow wounded within it, reversing the usual idea of a remote, untouchable deity.
Literary Devices in The Prayers of God
- Apostrophe - The poem directly addresses God by many names, creating the force of a prayer that is also a confrontation.
- Repetition - Repeated cries such as the appeals for mercy and the insistence that God is silent intensify the emotional pressure and urgency.
- Imagery - Vivid images of blood, devils, smoke, and mutilation make violence feel immediate and overwhelming.
- Shift in voice - The poem moves from communal lament to personal confession, dramatizing a moral awakening rather than a static complaint.
- Irony - Sacred language is placed beside acts of war, theft, and lynching, exposing the contradiction between religious language and human behavior.
- Rhetorical questions - A cascade of questions forces doubt, self-examination, and spiritual unease, especially as the speaker begins to suspect divine suffering.
- Allusion - References to God, Christ, Allah, and Elohim widen the poem beyond one creed, suggesting a universal appeal and a global moral reckoning.
Symbolism in The Prayers of God
- Blood - Blood represents both physical slaughter and moral stain, linking war, exploitation, and lynching into one shared guilt.
- Gold - Gold symbolizes greed and colonial extraction, the material appetite that drives violence and corrupts worship.
- The cross - The cross stands for Christian suffering, but the poem questions whether conventional religious symbols can contain the scale of real-world pain.
- Throne - God's throne suggests divine authority, yet the poem uses it to contrast heavenly power with earthly chaos and silence.
- Temples - The temples symbolize human religion itself, shown as polluted when it fails to stop cruelty or confront injustice.
- Bullets - Bullets become emblems of modern, impersonal killing and the spread of suffering through organized violence.
Historical Context of The Prayers of God
The poem belongs to a period shaped by racial terror, imperial expansion, and the upheaval of modern warfare. Du Bois wrote during an era when lynching, colonial extraction, and nationalist violence were defining realities of the modern world, and his language reflects the moral outrage of Black intellectual and political protest. The poem's condemnation of racial hierarchy and exploitation fits squarely within the broader struggle against white supremacy and the misuse of religion to justify domination.
Its religious intensity also reflects a modernist crisis of faith, when inherited beliefs were increasingly tested by industrial warfare and mass suffering. The poem draws on Christian, Islamic, and Hebrew names for God to suggest a world-spanning spiritual reckoning rather than a narrow sectarian lament. That breadth gives the poem the force of a universal indictment while remaining rooted in the historical violence of the early twentieth century.
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