Prayer before birth - Louis MacNeice

As the title says the poem is a prayer of an unborn baby. By this imaginary prayer poet gives picture of how cruel the world is.

In first stanza unborn child says, I am not yet born, O here me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club footed ghoul come near me. Rat, bat, stoat and ghoul are symbols of evil people. Child wants to remain far away from all kind of evil people.

In next stanza child asks for consolation. Baby fears that human race will make task walls around, inject drugs in, they will tell wise lies and will roll in pool of blood. In this stanza we can see situation of second world war where everybody was fighting and uncountable people were killed.

Now child demands something. Baby wants water, grass, trees to talk, sky to sing and white light in back of the mind to guide him.

Though baby is not burn he asks for forgiveness. He asks to God to forgive him for the sins that world commits through him, the words that speak through him, his “treason engendered by traitors" The child means to say the society may compel him to murder someone or the traitors may cause him to betray his own motherland. He asks for forgiveness for all these sins.

The next stanza is about lessons. The child asks God to be his teacher and teach him about how he should react when he faces situations like bureaucracy, old men lecturing, mockery from lovers, his own children cursing him or the beggars refusing his gift.

The sixth stanza summarizes the whole poem. The first lines of the sixth stanza may refer to men like Hitler who think themselves to be God and he asks Him to keep him away from such men. Moreover, he asks to fill him with courage and willpower to stand up against the inhumanity and such humans who would destroy him to recreate him into an insignificant part of a machine, or turn his face into one expressionless face or like as if the child was a small stone which the winds blow here to there. In the end baby requests, "let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.

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Ajit Kaliya

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