Programme 2

Prayer Before Birth

  Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Written amid the 1944 bombing of London, MacNeice’s apocalyptic work expresses foreboding about the menace of modern living, which is every bit in tune with the tenor of our own times. Through the persona of an unborn child, the monologue makes an anxious plea for individuality, a worthwhile and natural life free from any manipulatory and corrupting power of threats and terrors. Given the way of the world, the poem closes with a stark conclusion.

The incantatory form gives the plea a highly emotive, ritualistic power. Flexible cadences are manipulated to create a complex rhythmic momentum. There is an insistent hammering of monosyllables, saturated with alliteration and assonance:

with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

Tom Paulin, commenting during the programme, finds it a poem pitched to breaking point, ‘taking language to the limit … reading it you’ve got to keep running to keep up with the rhythm but the rhythm is always beyond you’. Fellow poet, Kate Clanchy, observes that ‘the beat of these repeating lines, like the repeated things that the world does to the child, become part of the meaning of the poem, and the way the words run away with you as you read through also become part of the meaning of the poem because the world is running away with the child, or might run away with the child’.