Reread Prayer Before Birth by Louis Macneice. Explore how the poet conveys the modern world as brutal and a corrupting force.

In prayer before birth, Louis Macneice uses a baby to convey his thoughts and emotions on the current state of the world. Macneice wishes to emphasize how harsh and ruthless the world is, and how it can strip away a young unborn baby of its innocence. By cleverly combining uses of structure, rhyme scheme and rhetorical techniques Macneice effectively conveys the pain and suffering which occurs in society today.
The poem is set out like an appeal, a cry for help. The title itself, using the word "prayer" shows that the baby is trying to get help for something which troubles him- which rais…