This is a poem about the imperfections, the challenge, the despair but still the hope and beauty of being human. It could be read as a paean to life for the unborn, as a map for everything a human life contains—all its challenges to overcome and temptations to avert—but I think of the unborn in this case as a metaphor. It feels to me like the “before birth” here is in some sense about the life we live before we realise the life we are meant to live.

There’s a line that’s usually attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, “Every man has two lives, and the second begins the moment he realises he has just one.”

That’s how I feel about Prayer Before Birth. It is about that moment when we are born into our one true life, or about the time before that moment. “Let them not make me a stone” hints at the outside forces that apply to all our lives. Outside forces—work, society, culture, whatever arbitrary set of behaviours and things that are somehow seen as accepted or normal—push us in different directions, and the big task, maybe the biggest task of all our lives, is to find a way to push back against whatever norms are holding us back and find a way of realising our true place in the world at the moment of our birth, or rebirth.

Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet of the 20th century. This is the second MacNeice poem to feature here. You can listen to “Entirely” in Episode 49.

You can read Prayer Before Birth here

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