DU SOL Q3 A Part "Prayer Before Birth" In the Poem, the phrase “I am not yet born; oh hear me” is repeated throughout the poem. What effect does this paradoxical refrain create in the poem?

 

Prayer Before Birth 

Q3 (A) In the Poem (passage 2), the phrase “I am not yet born; oh hear me” is repeated throughout the poem. What effect does this paradoxical refrain create in the poem?......

"Prayer Before Birth" is a poem by the Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice, written during World War II and first published in MacNeice's 1944 collection Springboard. The speaker, an unborn child, prays for future guidance and protection from the horrors of the modern world, and possesses great foresight about humankind's capacity for self-destruction and violence. The speaker ultimately insists that, if this prayer cannot be answered, the speaker would rather not be born at all. The poem is thus a damning condemnation of the state humanity found itself in around the middle of the 20th century.

The speaker makes a desperate plea (most likely to God, given that this is a “prayer”) asking for strength and guidance to navigate the world—a frightening, violent place in the poem, full of cruelty, greed, and outright evil. Through this prayer, the poem implies that humanity has lost its way, becoming stuck in a cycle of hatred, destruction, and denial that threatens to corrupt the innocence of each new generation.

The fact that the speaker is an unborn child means they’re currently protected from humanity, safe inside the warmth of a womb. But the speaker knows that, in being born, they will become part of the human family—a prospect the poem presents like something out of a horror movie. The speaker begins by asking for protection from “bloodsucking bat[s]” and “ghouls” before moving on to concerns that are less macabre, yet no less terrifying. The poem refers to imprisonment, drugs, lies, murder, and torture as inevitable parts of the human experience.

The issue isn’t only that the speaker is afraid of these things themselves, either; the speaker anticipates how there will be a conflict between the speaker’s innocence and the corrupting influence of humanity. That is, the speaker understands that in being born to the human world, the speaker will become a member of the “human race”—that same race that the speaker fears will drug, lie to, imprison, and torture them.

Before even being born, the speaker thus asks for forgiveness for the sins that the world is going to make the speaker commit, for the inevitable “treason” that comes from getting by in such a world. The speaker asks for practice when it comes to “the parts [they] must play” and “the cues [they] must take” in responding to the horrors the speaker will face, implying that a loss of innocence is practically inevitable and inescapable.

Yet even as the poem has an atmosphere of hopelessness, the speaker maintains a degree of grit and determination. The speaker asks for the “strength” to combat “those who would freeze [the speaker's] humanity,” for example. It isn’t that humanity is inherently corrupt, then, but that it has become corrupt. Perhaps, if humanity had to become self-destructive, there remains the possibility of change—the faintest glimmer of hope for a better world.

That said, the speaker senses that the chance of human civilization changing its ways is remote. The speaker wishes to retain their innocence—to not be made into a “stone”—but most of the poem suggests that this is near-impossible. In the poem’s powerful last line, the speaker states clearly that they would rather die than live in a world in which their innate humanity has to be corrupted, casting doubt on whether the speaker really wants to be born at all. In the end, then, the poem asks whether it’s fair to bring new life into a world so full of death and destruction.