Prayer Before Birth

603 Words3 Pages
This poem is written in the first person point of view, whereas the narrator is an unborn baby. This is shown through every single beginning sentence of each stanza, “I am not yet born.” The poem talks of how an unborn baby is praying for its life ahead, how it wishes to be protected against the evils of the world upcoming. We can tell that the poem is directed to God himself from the sixth stanza, where the baby says,” O hear me, let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.” The baby is begging God to keep all those fake idols away from him and to keep it away from any other fraud who thinks that they are invincible. There are a lot of uses of alliteration, for example: bloodsucking bat; drugs dope; lies lure; blood-baths; grass grow; trees talk; sky sing… There is also use of metaphors, especially in the seventh and eighth stanza. In the seventh stanza, it talks of how humanity will turn the baby into “a thing with one face”. It basically is trying to say that humanity will take away the emotions and the conscious of the baby, and it was scared and being “inhuman”. It fears that it’ll become a “cog in a machine” or be blown like “thistledown hither and thither” or be wasted like water held in hands. From all this, we can see that “Prayer Before Birth” is a powerful monologue, with its flowing lines, each heavy in their use of rhymes and repetition and alliteration. It’s a firm, driving, crazed prayer; they’re powerful, yet wonderfully emotional. Right from the title to the ending of the poem, it casts a very cruel light on the evilness of society and the corruption of mankind all over the world. The fact that the author had to take up the persona of the unborn child shows how little he thinks of mankind. The world is such that he doesn’t think that even a young child; an infant, can remain unpolluted from its cruelties. He was
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