Summary
The speaker announces that they are unborn, and asks that they be kept safe from a number of threatening creatures. They note that they are scared that humanity will imprison them, drug them, tempt them with lies, and torture them.
They humbly ask for elements of care to help them grow like water, grass, trees, the sky, birds, and the sun.
Then, they ask forgiveness from the reader for the sins they have not yet, but will someday commit through words, thoughts, and actions. They explain that they will be at the mercy of other societal forces and will be powerless to act freely.
Next, the speaker asks for a "rehearsal" of certain scenarios on earth so that they will know how to best behave in accordance with their "part" (18-19). They imagine being lectured, criticized, and laughed at. They also imagine a beggar refusing their gift and their own children growing up only to hate them.
They ask, once again, to be kept away from evil forces, this time described as "the man who is beast or who thinks he is God" (26).
The speaker asks for the power to fight against the forces that would attempt to strip them of their humanity and autonomy. They compare this state to becoming a robot or mechanism in a larger, corrupt machine. To live this way, the speaker argues, is no different from being so delicate that the wind can blow them from one place to another. It is, they conclude, like being water spilled from somebody else's cup.
In the final couplet, the speaker begs not to be made into a stone, nor to be transformed to liquid. If this is their fate, they tell the reader, they prefer to be killed.
Analysis
One of the first elements of "Prayer Before Birth" that readers are likely to notice is the unique point of view. The first line of the poem announces, "I am not yet born," introducing the speaker as an unborn entity (1). This line – which is repeated throughout the poem – immediately imbues the speaker with a sense of innocence and purity, likely stirring sentimentality and pity in the audience. Notably, however, the poet does not attempt to portray the speaker as an actual child; instead, the speaker delivers the poem with marked knowledge and even criticisms of the state of humanity.
Thus, the poem's perspective encourages readers – who, at the time, would have been experiencing the daily devastation of the Second World War – to reflect on their current moment by thinking about future generations. In this way, the poem develops a paradox between the speaker's presumed innocence and their scathing critique of humanity, allowing the speaker to become a mouthpiece for social and political critique precisely because they are "removed" (through their unborn status) from the present circumstances.
As the poem progresses, the speaker's requests themselves develop from nightmarish abstractions to real and pointed evils in society. In the first stanza, for instance, the speaker asks from protection from bats, rats, and ghouls. These threats actually emphasize the speaker's innocence and childlike perspective. However, that version of the speaker quickly dissipates as they begin making references to prisons, drugs, and lies, noting how fearful they are that the world will inflict these forces on them. Even more specific, the speaker later imagines being lectured by "old men," criticized by "bureaucrats," and laughed at by "lovers" (20-21). These fears are no longer those of a child. Instead, they showcase the speaker's intimate knowledge of how the world has fallen – how certain unworthy people have claimed and possessed power, and how humanity is no longer characterized by free will. Indeed, in one of the more complex stanzas of the poem, the speaker notes that their own words will "speak" them, their own thoughts will "think" them, and their own hands will "murder" them (12-17). Readers may find this stanza challenging to parse due to its inverted syntax and fundamentally illogical notion of a person being controlled by their own behavior. However, what this stanza suggests through its illogical structure is the phenomenon of one's loss of free will and autonomy. Observing the state of the world around them (fraught with destruction, death, and propaganda), the speaker suggests that people will be brainwashed to think they are free when, in reality, their thoughts, words, and actions are being controlled by those in power.
In the second-to-last stanza, the speaker presents a number of euphemisms for humanity's fate, saying, "Fill me / With strength against those who would freeze my / humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, / would make me a cog in a machine" (28-31). Here, though they do not say so explicitly, the speaker alludes to the war itself through the concept of the "lethal automaton." This term is a euphemism for soldier, suggesting that militaries are composed of robotic killing machines. The speaker entreats the reader to spare them of this fate, an interesting sentiment to exude in the midst of World War II, when entire civilian societies were mobilizing in an effort to aid their militaries. Rather than bolster this patriotic interpretation of war that was dispersed to the masses, however, the speaker instead condemns war in its entirety as a vehicle of death.
As the poem concludes, the speaker presents two inevitable versions of humanity in the contemporary world. They compare their fate to becoming either a stone or water spilled from a cup. These two images, while polar opposites, both ultimately suggest the same outcome: either one becomes hardened and ineffectual, or one becomes too easily manipulated by others and therefore, also ineffectual. The speaker perceives these images as representations of humanity's worst attributes, which either freeze or coerce people into a state of helplessness. It is this state, the speaker concludes, that they wish to avoid at all costs. When they ask the reader, in the final couplet, to kill them rather than subject them to these two outcomes, they are arguing that never entering the world is preferable to entering it at this moment and becoming part of society that is fundamentally flawed, corrupt, and headed for oblivion.
