Poem " Before Birth"

About Writer :

Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice was born on September 12, 1907, in Belfast, Ireland. He attended Oxford, where he majored in classics and philosophy. In 1930, he married Giovanna Ezra and accepted a post as classics lecturer at the University of Birmingham, a position he held until 1936, when he went on to teach Greek at Bedford College for Women, University of London. In 1941, he joined the British Broadcasting Company as a staff writer and producer. Like many modern English poets, MacNeice found an audience for his work through British radio. Some of his best-known plays, including 'Christopher Columbus' (1944), and 'The Dark Tower' (1946), were originally written for radio and later published.

Early in his career, MacNeice was identified with a group of politically committed poets whose work appeared in Michael Roberts's anthology New Signatures. MacNeice drew many of the texts for Modern Poetry: 'A Personal Essay from the New Signature poets'. Modern Poetry was MacNeice's plea for an "impure" poetry expressive of the poet's immediate interests and his sense of the natural and the social world.

Despite his association with young British poets Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, writer Christopher Isherwood, and other left-wing poets, MacNeice was as mistrustful of political programs as he was of philosophical systems. He was never a member of the Communist Party or any other political groups, and he was quite candid about the ambiguities of his political attitudes. "My sympathies are Left," he wrote. "But not in my heart or my guts."

Although he chose to live the majority of his adult life in London, MacNeice frequently returned to the landscapes of his childhood, and he took great pride in his Irish heritage. His poetry is characterized by its familiar, sometimes humorous tone and its integration of contemporary ideas and images. In addition to his poetry and radio dramas, MacNeice also wrote the verse translation 'The Agamemnon of Aeschylus' (1936), translated Goethe's 'Faust' (1951), and collaborated with Auden on the 'travelogue Letters from Iceland' (1937).

In August of 1963, MacNeice, on location with a BBC team, insisted on going down into a mineshaft to check on sound effects. He caught a chill that was not diagnosed as pneumonia until he was fatally ill.

He died on September 3, 1963, just before the publication of his last book of poems, The Burning Perch. He was 55 years old.

Poem 

I haven't been born yet. Please listen to me. Don't let vampire bats, rats, stoats, or even ghosts with deformed feet get close to me.

I haven't been born yet. Please make me feel better. I'm afraid that people will imprison me, drug me, deceive me, torture me, and bathe me in the blood of those they massacre.

I haven't been born yet. Please give me water to play in, long grasses that will grow around me, trees that I can talk to, singing skies full of birds—and a sense of what's right to guide me through life.

I haven't been born yet. Please forgive me in advance for the bad things that the world will make me do—the horrible things I'll say, the terrible things I'll think. Forgive me for my betrayals, though they will be caused by others, and for the murders people will make me commit. Forgive me when I die for how my life turned out.

I haven't been born yet. Please teach me the role I will have to play in life, and how to respond when old men tell me what to think, when officials pressure me. Teach me what do when mountains are angry at me, or when lovers mock me. Teach me what I should do when the crashing waves ask me to be foolish, and the desert calls me to death and destruction. Teach me how to act when beggars reject my charity and my own children hate me.

I haven't been born yet. Please listen to me—I don't want violent, beastly men to come near me, nor those who think they are God.

I haven't been born yet. Please grant me the strength to resist the people who want to take away my humanity, and those who want to turn me into a killing machine. Don't let them force 

me to be one small part of some greater contraption, something with no individuality. Don't let them reduce me to a mere object, and don't let them dissolve my identity. I'm talking about those people who would blow me all over the place as if I were the fine hair on a thistle ant. I don't want to be like water spilling out of their hands.

Please don't let them turn me into a cold, hard-hearted stone or spill me. If you can't help me with this prayer, then don't let me be born at all.

Thinking activities 

1. Justify your understanding of the poem Prayer Before Birth.

This poem, ‘Prayer Before Birth’, written during the terror struck days of World War II, places the realities of an evil world into the mouth of a baby not even quite born. This baby cries out for protection against evil. The tactic of speaking through a baby allows the readers to see the juxtaposition of evil and innocence.The newborn baby is quite innocent, as he has not even taken his first breath in the world. However, his knowledge of all things evil allows the reader to understand the true gravity of the evils of the world. It makes one feel sympathy toward this new baby, and all that he would experience during life. It makes the reader want to protect his innocence, and the innocence of the children in his or her own life. ‘Prayer Before Birth’ calls out to God as the only one who can protect against the evil of the world. The author makes his own thoughts very clear by presenting them through the mouth of a baby.

 2. Why does the unborn child plea for a strength?

the speaker calls out to God for protection against what the world would want to do to him. He does not want God to allow the people of the world to “freeze [his] humanity”. He does not want to become “a cog in a machine”. With this stanza, the author reveals what he thinks about war. When the baby asks God not to let him because “a thing with one face, a thing…against all those who would dissipate my entirety”, it is clear that the author feels hatred toward war. He knows that the other side wants to “dissipate” him, but he still does not want to become the face at the other end. He does not want to become a “lethal automaton”, trained to kill. He wants freedom from this kind of lifestyle.

3. What is the role of natural elements in this poem?

This relationship with nature, the speaker feels, goes hand-in-hand with a “white light / in the back of my mind to guide me.” White light here refers a kind of moral strength and virtue—one that, not incidentally, is symbolically linked to the warmth and life-giving light of the sun. The poem thus clearly portrays the natural world as a positive influence. In a poem mostly concerned with the worst aspects of humanity, this is a much-needed moment of hope.