Summarise the poem To An Unborn Pauper Child

 Summarise the poem "To An Unborn Pauper Child"--

The poem To an Unborn Pauper Child is taken from the collection. Poems of the Past and the Present: Poems of Pilgrimage, published in 1901. In the preface to the collection Hardy noted: "the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomenon as they are forced upon us by chance and change." It is believed that the poem was inspired by an incident that očcurred in the Dorchester Magistrate's Court, which he chanced upon. Hardy read of a pauper women in the records of the court of petty sessions which said that "she must go to the Union-house to have her baby", and this occasioned the poem. Hardy's poems convincingly convey the sadness of life and mirror the pathos encapsulated in Virgil's dictum: 

Sunt lacrimae rerum-

"There are tears in things". There is nothing hopeful about earthly life. In this poem, Hardy adopts an anti-natal stance. He stands with the Greek dramatist Sophocles who said in Oedipus at Colonus that, "Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came". Because what is life but "Envy, factions, strife, bottles, and murders". And in the end comes the pitiful lot of the old: “blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries". "To an Unborn Pauper Child is a dark poem which is meant to be a warning to the yet-to-be born child. It bids the child to stop breathing while still in its mother's womb and bid good bye to the world. The world is a dark, dreary one full of 'travails and teens' – difficulties and sorrows, with nothing alleviating about it. So is better to sleep the eternal sleep.

Written in the traditional rhythmic mode, the poem consists of six etanzas of six lines each, rhyming aabbcc. The first, the second and the Gêh lines in each stanza are cast in iambic tetrametre; the third and the fourth in iambic dimetre and the sixth, which is the last line, is fashioned in jambie pentametre, which gives the effect of a grand statement. Iambic is a traditional metre in English language composed of two syllables of which the first syllable unstressed or unaccented and the second one stressed or accented. Here Hardy considers the probable fate of a child soon to be born into poverty. The poem grew fróm an incident that the poet probably witnessed in the Dorchester Magistrate's Court but his sincerity and compassion for the plight of human beings makes the incident of concern to us all. The poem is worth comparing with other pieces on the birth of young children. Poem's Summary The poem begins startlingly with an opening line in which Hardy addresses the child as "hid heart" because it is as yet unborn in its mother's womb, and advises it not to be born - to "Breathe not" and to "cease silently". The rest of the stanza gives Hardy's reason for this advice. It is better to "Sleep the long sleep" because fate ("The Doomsters") will bring the child troubles and difficulties ("Travails and teens") in its life, and "Time-wraiths turn our song singings to fear", that is our spontaneous feelings of joy and happiness in life are turned to fear by time. Time as usual in Hardy's writings is seen as the enemy of man and the unusual conceptions of Fate as "Doomsters" and Time as "Time-wraiths" (Spirits) suggests a conscious and deliberate process at work. In the second stanza, Hardy develops the idea of the destructiveness of time urging the child to listen to how people sigh, and to note how time destroys all such natural positive values as "laughter", "hopes", "faiths", "affections" and "enthusiasms". Set against these positive nouns are negative verbs suggesting this withering process: "sigh", "fail", "die", "dwindle", "waste" and "numb". The verse concludes by stressing that the child cannot alter this process if it is born. In the third stanza, Hardy vows that if he were able to communicate with the unborn before their life on earth began, and if the child were able to choose whether to live or die, he would impart all his knowledge to the child and ask it if it would take life as it is. Hardy immediately, and forcefully, rejects this as a futile vow, for neither he nor anyone can explain to the child what will happen to him/ her when s/he is born ("Life's pending plan"). The stanza contains weaknesses of style: the oddity of "theeward" and the clumsy inversion Explain none can". But the last two lines present starkly the inevitability of birth in spite of the most dreadful events Life can bring. 

In contrast to the ending of the fourth stanza, the fifth one open very gently. Hardy speaks directly and tenderly to the child, in simpla monosyllables, wisbing that he could find some secluded place ("sh plot") in the world for it, where its life would be calm, unbroken by te or qualm. But with tender simplicity, and the absence of any bitterness Hardy recognises that "I am weak as thou and bare" - he is as unable the child is to influence fate. The poem ends with the recognition that the child must come and live ("bide") on earth, and the hope that in spite of the evidence, it will find health, love and friends and "joys seldom yet attained" by people Time is perceived as an enemy of man in Hardy's writings. Curious notions of Fate as Doomsters and of Time as Wraiths which haunt, lend it a note of ominous determinism. Time erodes all such natural positive values as "laughter", "hopes", faiths", "affections" and "enthusiasms". While pitted against these positive nouns st nd negative verbs: "sigh", "fail", "die", "dwindle", "waste" and "numb", which highlight the withering process. Though the poem addresses the unborn 'pauper' child specifically, the terrible things he attributes to the world may be applicable to any child born into the world, even though it may be säid that without the support systems needed to exist on earth, the lot of a pauper child may be all the more pitiable. Hardy has witnessed several disruptive events in the world, and had seen the various modes of fighting and the aftermath of World War I- and the line "Though skies spout fire and blood and nations quake" might be a reference to the aerial warfare and blitzkrieg (Lightning War) during the World War. The poem is addressed to the child. It is an 'apostrophe': a rhetorical device in the form of an address to someone not present. Many of the stanzas begin with injunctions and interjections: "Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently", "Hark!" "Vain vow!" "Must come and bide". Written in traditional metre and stanzaic pattern, the poem effectively makes use of alliterations such as, "hid Heart", "cease silently", "birth-hour beckons", "Travails and teens" "surge and sigh", "pending plan", "wide wold", etc. Personification of Time as Time-wraiths conveys the vagaries of time as well as the tormenting and obsessive nature of the phenomena on human psyche. Provincialisms and archaisms such as 'teens', 'wold and 'fain' which mean 'harms' 'open land' and 'gladly' respectively lene quaintness of the old world to the poem. There are strange coinages I 'theeward', which sound unfamiliar and rather awkward. The rhythm o the iambic metre imparts a rhythmic tone to the poem, similar to rocking of a cradle. For Hardy, poetry was "emotion put into measute where "the emotion must come by nature", but measure must "acquired Ly art". To an Unborn Pauper Child is a perfect synthesis U emotion and measure - a splendid blend of nature and art.