When The Army Prays For Watty - Analysis

A prayer staged at the pub door

The poem’s central move is to place a scene of salvation right against the everyday machinery of drink and mateship, and then to show how little either side truly changes. The Army turns up at the entrance of his pub at that soft, theatrical hour when moon and star hide the picture on the signboard and the last color drains from the mulga scrub. But the setting isn’t a cathedral; it’s Watty’s threshold, where moral earnestness meets a community that has already decided what kind of peace it wants.

The speaker’s half-joke, half-hope

Lawson gives us a narrator who is not outside the scene judging it; he is inside it, slightly tipsy, affectionate, and self-aware. He sits at Watty’s with a head full of jingles and the fumes of bottled beer, admitting both his sentimentality and his weakness. His reason for being there during the prayer is comically small but emotionally telling: he has a fancy that if he’s present, he’ll be included in the prayer. That line reveals a tension at the heart of the poem: he doesn’t fully believe in the Army’s system, yet he still wants the comfort of belonging to its mercy—without surrendering his place among the drinkers.

Watty as an untroubled “publican”

Watty himself is drawn with a kind of stubborn calm. He lounges in his arm-chair with an old accustomed place, his face round and passive, his arms clasped in a posture that could resemble prayer but clearly isn’t. When the Army prays, he merely nods and dozes. The speaker briefly tries to force drama into Watty’s interior life—wondering if he ponder[s] distant years or fears the warm place down below where according to good Christians, all the publicans should go. Yet the poem refuses that conversion narrative. Watty’s features show no struggle: just peace that is unbroken and a conscience well at rest.

The unbroken routine: guzzling, loafers, and “shouters”

The sharpest irony is that the prayer happens, and then life continues exactly as before. The group guzzle as we guzzled and the loafers still wait for shouters—for someone else to pay—and they get there just the same. This is more than a joke about drinking culture. It’s Lawson’s way of showing how a community can absorb moral performance without letting it touch the habits that actually organize their nights: who buys, who benefits, who sits in the “accustomed place,” who watches the door.

How much prayer would it take to change anything?

The poem’s late admission—It would take a lot of praying, lots of thumping on the drum—pushes the humor toward something closer to resignation. The Army’s methods (the drum, the public prayer) are portrayed as both sincere and faintly inadequate against the thickness of sinful, straying, erring souls. The contradiction is that the speaker calls himself and his mates fellow-sinners without flinching, as if naming the problem is easier than wanting a cure. In that light, the repeated phrase the Army prays for Watty starts to sound less like rescue and more like a nightly ritual of distance: the Army stands outside, the drinkers remain inside, and everyone keeps their role.

A final kindness that doesn’t cancel the irony

Still, the ending refuses cruelty. The speaker says plainly, I love my fellow-sinners, and hopes the Army gets a hearing when it prays for Watty’s soul. That hope is complicated: it’s not a vow to reform, and it isn’t a sneer at religion either. It is a modest wish that some good might land, somehow, on people who are not currently willing to change. The poem’s tone, finally, is affectionate skepticism—tender toward the men at the bar, respectful enough toward the prayer, and quietly doubtful that either warmth (the pub’s) or warning (the Army’s) will prove stronger than habit.