Poems for a baby

I just became a dad a month or so ago, and I've been trying to write a poem or two for the baby. Amid the muslins and mountains of nappies, the writing hasn't been going so well, but the reading around's been interesting.

There are a lot of great baby poems, from William Blake's "I have no name / I am but two days old" to the entire fine and tender collection Newborn by Kate Clanchy. A whole sub-genre is the baby poem as incantation (from Latin incantare, to chant, bewitch, cast a spell). In "Born Yesterday", a poem for Kingsley Amis's daughter Sally, Larkin takes on the unlikely role of fairy godmother. You can almost imagine the moonrise of his bonce over the pram-rim as he addresses the baby:

Tightly-folded bud,

I have wished you something

None of the others would . . .

May you be ordinary;

Have, like other women,

An average of talents:

Not ugly, not good-looking,

Nothing uncustomary

To pull you off your balance . . .

In fact, may you be dull –

If that is what a skilled,

Vigilant, flexible,

Unemphasised, enthralled

Catching of happiness is called.

The optative mood (may you be . . .) suggests prayer, and Larkin's poem is a middle-England commonsensical correction of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter". The Irishman had come to parenthood late, and was in his mid‑50s when his first child, Ann, was born, although he too wished her manageable gifts:

May she be granted beauty and yet not

Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught . . .

Whereas Larkin insists that he doesn't wish "the usual stuff / about being beautiful, / or running off a spring / Of innocence", Yeats wants his daughter to think "opinions are accursed" so that she may recover "radical innocence". He wants her to have the gift of being "happy still" even if everything around her is in turmoil, and for her husband to bring her to "a house / where all's accustomed, ceremonious". (Larkin wishes "nothing uncustomary . . .") It's tricky, reading Yeats now, not to find the ideals he had for his daughter a little restrictive and chauvinist: be decorative, decorous, and wed an aristocrat.

Fourteen years earlier, in the introductory rhymes to his collection Responsibilities, Yeats was already thinking, rather grandly, about inheritance and ancestry – "Merchant and scholar who have left me blood / That has not passed through any huckster's loins" – and asking "pardon" that "Although I have come close on forty-nine, / I have no child, I have nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine."

Though I'm sure it's a simplification, I've been struck by how often, for male poets, having children roots itself in linear imagery, bloodlines, inheritance; whereas for female poets, the process is a form of replacement, of disappearing. Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" begins (brilliantly):

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements . . .

and continues

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

Here, maternity is self-sacrifice, likened to rain falling, forming a pool which then shows the rain-cloud's own dispersal. The key word (foregrounded by its length, and the overlong build-up line preceding it) is effacement, the act of one thing erasing another. The female poetics of childbirth often deal with Thanatos, with Freud's death-drive, whereas for males it's bound up with Eros (and egos), with continuance, unity, cohesion. The male sees something created in his own image; the female sees her own image being eliminated by another.

In Jorie Graham's "Wanting a Child", the bare metaphors of a river, rocks and the sea interact in complicated analogies; the river cuts "deep into the parent rock, / scouring and scouring / its own bed", and the poem ends by describing how the tide (the want for a child?)

is always pulsing upward, inland, into the river's rapid

argument, pushing

with its insistent tragic waves – the living echo,


to be recalled by us

but transferred

whole on to this shore by waves, so that erosion

is its very face.

"Erosion / is its very face". In Eliot's words, "in my beginning is my end".

If childbirth in poems written by women often surfaces as a form of oblivion, effacement, erosion, for male poets the analogies are repeatedly linear – connective strings, lines, ropes. In Simon Armitage's Book of Matches sequence, the speaker goes with his mother to measure "windows, pelmets, doors, / the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors":


length, reporting metres, centi- metres back to base, then


up the stairs, the line still feeding

out, unreeling

years between us. Anchor. Kite.

Later on he writes, referring to his wife and himself:

I think about the time

we find we hold the loose end of the family line . . .

Seamus Heaney, in "A Kite for Michael and Christopher" (his sons), writes of watching it rise "far up like a small black lark", and adds:

My friend says that the human soul

is about the weight of a snipe,

yet the soul at anchor there,

the string that sags and ascends,

weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

and this line goes useless

take it in your two hands, boys, and feel

the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand here in front of me

and take the strain.

There may be grief here, yes, but it's part of the process, a natural chain, a passing-on rather than a rubbing-out.

Larkin, childless, and no stranger to the death-drive (in "Wants", he writes "beneath it all, desire of oblivion") sums up the countervailing views in "Dockery and Son". The protagonist visits his old college: "Dockery was junior to you, / Wasn't he?" said the Dean. "His son's here now." Having "no son, no wife, / No house or land" himself, the speaker is amazed at "how / Convinced [Dockery] was he should be added to! / Why did he think adding meant increase? / To me it was dilution." Increase or dilution? I don't know if it's either or neither or both, though I know I find myself holding the wee dote on my knee thinking, now surely to God I can get a poem out of you . . .

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