Prayer Before Birth Poem

How do ‘Gabriel Okara, Chinua Achebe’ and Louis MacNeice’ communicate their ideas about the theme of growing up in the poems ‘Once upon a time’ ‘, ‘a mother in a refugee camp’ and ‘Prayer before Birth’? This essay will also make some reference to the poems ‘Half Past Two’, If- ‘and ‘Hide and seek’, by ‘U.A Fanthorpe’, ‘Rudyard Kipling’ and Vernon Scannell.

"Growing up is always a part of our lives. We experience life through physical and mental challenges and by overcoming it, we most often arrive at the highest point of maturity". In this essay, ‘Once upon a time’, ‘A mother in a refugee camp’ and ‘Prayer before Birth’ will be the three major poems and it will also make some reference to the poems ‘Half Past Two’, If- ‘and ‘Hide and seek’.

From the poem ‘A mother in a refugee camp’, on line 4 to line 7, it shows vivid imageries describing how ‘The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,/ Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs/ And dried-up bottoms waddling in laboured steps/ Behind blown-empty bellies.’, ‘The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea’. The personification and synesthesia of ‘The air was heavy’ helps to exaggerate and emphasise on the olfactory imagery produced, such as the ‘odors of diarrhea’, implying to the readers how revolting the atmosphere was, due to the disease of malnutrition. Additionally, Achebe emphasises this vivid imagery by the use of contrasts between the words ‘unwashed children’ and ‘washed-out ribs’. In addition, the sibilance of ‘s’ in the word ‘washed’ adds to the description of the unhealthy and suffering children .The alliteration and compound word in ‘Behind blown-empty’ also emphasizes on the hardships the children face in the refugee camp. This intensifies the picture of unpleasantness by the way the poets describe how dirty and ill the children are as they grow up. Then as well, the poem ‘Once upon a time’ uses words that creates a strong sense of imagery throughout the poem, for example, the compound word used in describing the ‘ice-block-cold’ eyes, the contrast of the personification in ‘laughing with their eyes’ and ‘now they only laugh with their teeth’ and the fricative sound of ‘t’, ‘s’, ‘f’ in ‘teeth like a snake’s bare fangs’. These works together to highlight the connotations of evil. The use of imagery in this poem helps the poet, Gabriel Okara, describe the contrast between now and then and how he laments the loss of his innocent youth during when he was growing up. The strong imagery which is used to describe the setting of the refugee camp, brings out the desolation surrounding of the poem ‘A