Prayer Before Birth

• Title

  • “Prayer” - sense of fear and desperation
  • “Before Birth” - From the perspective of an unborn child
• Juxtaposition

  Great excitement/hope for unborn child is juxtaposed with the cynical tone of the poem
• Anaphora - “i am not yet born” (start of each stanza)


  reminder of the innocence and vulnerability of the speaker
• Imperatives - “hear” “console” “provide”

  commanding god to help them = sense of desperation
• Child-like images - “Bloodsucking bat” “club-footed ghoul”

  emphasises innocence of the unborn child
• Internal rhyme
• Alliteration and Assonance

  • “Tall walls wall me”
  • “Drugs dope”
  • “Lies lure”
  • ” Racks rack me”
  • ”blood-baths”
  • —> Concerned about torture, manipulation, entrapment juxtaposes with a nursery rhyme-like style
• Metaphor - “white light”

  Wisdom? God? Need a beckon of hope and guidance that God provides
• Metaphor - “the cues I must take”

  Loss of free will
• “forgive me”

  unborn child is already asking for forgiveness for the sins they will inevitably commit = sense of hopelessness
• pronoun “they”

  Sense that the responsibility lies in others