the haunting fear //that there is no one listening,

[soso]

I’ve just found in an old note-book [a poem], with no author’s name /attached, 

which is rather relevant to something () we were talking about /a few weeks ago

—I mean, the haunting fear //that there is no one listening,

and that [what we call prayer] is soliloquy: someone /talking to himself.

This writer takes the bull by the horns and says in effect:

‘Very well, suppose () it is’, and gets a surprising result. Here is the poem:

They tell me, Lord, that when I seem

To be in speech with you,

Since but one voice is heard, it’s all a dream,

One talker /aping two.

Sometimes it is, yet not as they

Conceive it. Rather, I

Seek in myself the things () I hoped to say,

But lo!, my wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake

The listener’s role and through

My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake

The thoughts () I never knew

And thus you neither need reply

Nor can; thus, while we seem

Two talkers, though are One forever, and I

No dreamer, but thy dream.

Dream makes it too like Pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme. 

But is he not right /in thinking that [prayer in its most perfect state] is soliloquy?

From Letters to Malcolm