Prayer Before Birth Essay Questions

What are the contextual clues that the poem was written during World War II?

While the poem is not explicitly about the Second World War, it does make subtle allusions to a war-torn Europe that MacNeice and others witnessed on a near daily basis. One of these allusions comes in the form of the "lethal automaton," a euphemism for a soldier who is trained to kill and always under the command of somebody else (30). The speaker also cautions against "the man who is beast or thinks he is God," which is likely a reference to the fascist leaders that had come to power across Europe, including Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy (26).

Is it a fair assessment to describe the tone of this poem, as many have done, as paranoid?

The poem certainly exhibits sentiments of paranoia, though to describe the poem as such would be to invalidate the very real criticisms expressed by the speaker about the state of the world. Rather than interpret the poem as the paranoid ramblings of a radical, one must consider the context within which the poem was written: World War II devastated the European landscape and ushered in new military technologies that could obliterate the world as we know it, most notably in the form of nuclear weaponry. Furthermore, the war also proved that fascist dictators had gained power and influence enough to wage attacks across the continent. Finally, the genocidal practices of the Nazi regime brought a new form of horror to society, killing innocent people in cold blood. It is this horror that the speaker wants to emphasize in the poem, expressing not paranoia exclusively but instead a bleak outlook on whether the world could ever recover from what they saw in the 1940s.