In a rather gnomic introduction MacNeice says that “these … are not, I assume, my 85 best poems – nor, even though I like them, the 85 which I like best”, & also that “The order of this Selection, divided into eight groups, is meant to be more or less significant”
I am afraid that that significance escapes me
It is however intriguing that, standing on its own, before the Foreword, is the poem To Hedli dated 1948 which contains the lines:
I stand here now dumfounded by the volume
Of angry sound which pours from every turning
On those who only so lately knew the answers
Prayer Before Birth comes very near the end of the Selection, dated 1945. I cannot resist reading it as a Prayer for the Baby Boomers 0f 1946-1948
from PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
I am not yet born; O 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, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
Hear a reading of the poem at
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