How Do These Poems Present the Ideas of Infancy and Childhood?

How do these poems present the ideas of infancy and childhood?

• ‘Infant Joy’ by William Blake

• ‘Infant Sorrow’ by William Blake

• ‘Prayer before birth’* by Louis MacNeice

• ‘You’re’ by Sylvia Plath

• ‘Once upon a time’* by Gabriel Okara

• ‘Piano’* by D.H. Lawrence

*anthology poems

Human rights activist Kailash Satyarthi once said: “Look at the world with a child’s eye – it is very beautiful.” Satyarthi may have meant that childhood is a period of innocence, beauty, and opportunity, where nothing seems impossible. However, some of these poems contrast greatly about this general point, either having an optimistic view towards infancy and childhood such as Infant Joy and Piano or a more cynical and pessimistic one such as Prayer before birth and Infant Sorrow.

Infant Joy, by William Blake, is a poem of pure optimism that portrays infancy as a sacred event. Blake presents the joyous and hopeful nature of infancy through a dialogue between the new born baby and its mother, which suggests that the poem is more symbolic rather than realistic. The dialogue between the mother and child, signified by the use of dashes, presents a sense of harmony between the infant’s pure sense of joy and also the adult’s equally pure expression of optimism about initially nameless baby’s future. Each line of the poem emphasizes the positive tone held throughout the poem, with the author’s utilizing simple diction choices such as “sweet”, “pretty”, and “joy”, which ends up being the infant’s self-proclaimed name in the first stanza. The celebratory nature of this poem is further cemented by the use of anaphora “Sweet joy” in each stanza, along with exclamation marks which, expresses the blessed nature of the unblemished purity that infants inherently possess. Moreover, the hyperbaton in line 4, “I happy am” highlights the baby’s innocence and positively frames it in a way that demonstrates emotional purity behind the child’s freedom of expression, without regard to grammatical rules.

In contrast, the accompanying poem Infant Sorrow’s bleak depiction of the adult world contrasts with the hopeful atmosphere maintained in Infant Joy. Infant Sorrow’s formal and rigidly patterned AABB rhyming structure immediately helps express the oppressive nature of adulthood, forbidding and dangerous rather than positive and full of possibility in the way that Infant Joy implies. Furthermore, words such as “leapt”, “striving” and “bound” belong to the semantic fields of struggle and imprisonment, maintaining an ominous tone throughout the poem.

During the Industrial Revolution, William Blake openly opposed social norms and the belief that social institutions created by the upper-class such as the Church of England were necessary to properly raise children. Blake even opposed the commonly accepted theory of ‘original sin’ (the tendency that all humans are innately evil) at the time as well and instead believed that these concepts were excessively authoritarian and exploited the intrinsic innocence and sense of imagination in children. This firm belief is portrayed as “swaddling bands” in the adult world, ironically expressed as protections that adults provided that preserved joy within the baby in Infant Joy. This provocative reversal portrays the hypocrisy of many parents during the Industrial Revolution, who raised and treated their children with care initially only so that they could later become financially productive, albeit unhappy laborers in factories to benefit them in the future. In addition, unlike Infant Joy, Infant Sorrow is told solely from the former child’s point of view, which allows the poem to provide a more tangible sense of the internal “helpless” and “naked” feelings of the character while also making the absence of the hope and opportunity which was emphasized by the parent in Infant Joy far more noticeable and emotionally impactful.

Prayer Before Birth – written by Louis MacNeice – is a dramatic monologue written from the perspective of an unborn child with an equally bleak perspective about the world that criticized toward society’s poor treatment of children during the time. Through the provocative imagery of a fetus making anxious requests to be protected in the cruel and dangerous world it anticipates, especially through the sensually evocative and terrifying mentioning of a “bloodsucking bat” or “rat” in line 2 of the first stanza, the author immediately establishes harsh and forbidding atmosphere for the rest of the poem. The author also highlights this negative imagery with a dramatic tone throughout the poem, especially through his choice to repeat “O” to emphasize such imperatives such as “O hear me” and “console me”. This also expresses a religious and almost prayer-like tone to the poem as well, which is ironic since the unborn child pleas are directed towards the reader, not God. These choices could be interpreted as a device to help communicate the author’s intent to directly criticize the state of society at the time, which failed to properly nurture children. In the penultimate stanza, the unborn child speaks of its desire to be considered an individual, instead of a “cog in a machine”, an allusion to soldiers who fought in World War II and were forced to commit murder when ordered to, like a “lethal automaton”. Since Prayer Before Birth was written in 1944, these phrases could clearly be interpreted as criticisms of misleading propaganda used to lead millions of young men into enlisting. When assessed together, these literary devices potentially help express MacNeice’s anger towards the deceptive actions taken by society, which ruined an entire generation of children. Like William Blake’s poem Infant Sorrow, Louis Macneice’s Prayer Before Birth are pieces of social criticism towards the sins committed towards children during the times in which they lived.

Furthermore, MacNeice’s structural choices in the poem help present infancy as an event not to be celebrated but pitied in general. The poem is written in free verse, in order to portray the world as a dark and unstable place akin to how the poem is also uneven and (structurally) incomplete. Yet, the constant repetition of words such as “me” and “I” gives momentum to the unborn child’s statements of the horrors which await him in society, as he does not want “old men to lecture” him or “bureaucrats to hector” him into leading a pointless life