From Your Readings ofMid-Term Break, Diary of a Church Mouse and Prayer before Birth, what insights do you get about human behavior? What literary techniques are used to heighten the experience?

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From Your Readings of”Mid-Term Break, “Diary of a Church Mouse” and “Prayer before Birth”, what insights do you get about human behavior? What literary techniques are used to heighten the experience?

By Emmanuel Sunil

In all three poems, the poets give as insight into the various aspects of human behavior. MacNeice in “Prayer before Birth” emphasizes the negative aspects in which a person will be treated through out their life and focuses in on how people will enslave you, manipulate you etc. In “Mid- Term Break”, Seamus Heaney comments on the nature of human behavior in public domain and how one reveals their true feelings in private. John Betjeman makes a satirical observation that people come to church for reasons other than spiritual satisfaction in “Diary of a Church Mouse”. Each poet also uses different literary techniques to heighten the experience.

“Prayer before Birth” is unique in that the speaker in an unborn child that has an awareness of what is going to happen in his life. Through the fetus, MacNeice tells us about all the negative ways in which others will treat you in all walks of life. One of the most important insights into human behavior is that people in power try to limit ones freedom (as in communist and fascist regimes) and MacNeice draws our attention to this in stanza 2, “I fear that the human race with tall walls wall me’, where it suggests that creativity and freedom of speech is being confined, which is of utmost importance to MacNeice as a poet (and critic). In the last stanza, MacNeice is concerned about being forced to alter his identity as the fetus asks for strength against those who “freeze my humanity…. make me a cog in a machine”. This infers to the communist and fascist countries where people are only permitted to do what they are told and perhaps he felt in this manner as he was uncertain weather Britain would win the Second World War. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, he points out to us that we are often manipulated and corrupted by others in power into wrong doing, when “old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me” to commit “murder by the means of my hand, my death when they live me”. Through this MacNeice indicates to us the severity of the sins that we commit.

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MacNeice conveys his thoughts on life and human behavior using a variety of literary techniques.  Each stanza in the poem begins with “I am not yet born;” which is followed by an order to us the reader, and by doing so, we are obliged to listen. There is a constant hammering of monosyllabic diction, which is blended with assonance, adds cold harshness to the sensitive nature of the words and it is as shocking as it is direct, “on black racks rack me, on blood baths roll me”. The details of this world are described in a powerful and graphic ...

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