Birth

That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What then remains, but that we still should cry,

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source Of human offspring.

All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

But oh! each visitation

Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.

LORD ILLINGWORTH : The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.

Not to be born surpasses thought and speech. The second best is to have seen the light And then to go back quickly whence we came.