Birth

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

I s’pect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.

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

What is the use of a new-born child?

Birth, and copulation, and death.

I had seen birth and death

Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.

But oh! each visitation

My mother groaned! my father wept.

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

What then remains, but that we still should cry,

As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

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?

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

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

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, But trailing clouds of glory do we come Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close

The Angel that presided o’er my birth Said, “Little creature, formed of joy and mirth, Go love without the help of any thing on earth.”

My mother groan’d! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud, Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Out of one man a race Of men innumerable.