Marston Childbirth Prayer

(Version 1)

All Powerful, Eternal God,
     without end of beginning,
     who created everything out of nothing;
by whose power the sea was created,
     which never extends to the furthest reaches;
who made the earth and contains the flow of winds in the caves,
     and who ever now brings forth seeds out of the hardest wood with unimaginable power;
who formed Adam from the dust of the earth, and forming woman from his side,
     joined her and him in matrimony,
and for the sake of growing future generations,
     gave them perpetual progeny and a blessing, saying:
"Be fruitful and multiply, 

     and fill the earth 

          and have dominion over the birds of the air 

          and the fish of the sea 

          and beasts too, of all kinds;" 

who extraordinarily made Abraham the Patriarch and his wife Sarah fertile, 

     granting the elderly pair offspring unexpectedly 

     despite their advanced age;
who also, with the Holy Spirit, 

     sent your son, our Lord Jesus Christ, 

     from your bosom to the womb of the immaculate Virgin,
so that he might lie hidden in the pregnant woman 

     as in a house in accordance with the human law,
and after the proper nine months of service, 

     as if heaving his bedroom, 

     with hs birth he leaves the Virgin's womb,
who furthermore, through that son, 

     and with twelve Apostles, 

I pray to you, God the Father,
     that the aid of your pity might extend to your pregnant servant,
          heavy with child,

     so that she may prevail in producing a child pleasing to you,

     without danger of death,
     and in nourishing a child worthy of serving you
          and devoted to worshipping you. 

By our same Lord, etc.

(Version 2)

All Powerful, Eternal God,
     without end of beginning,
     who created everything out of nothing;
by whose power the sea was created,
     which never extends to the furthest reaches;
who made the earth and contains the flow of winds in the caves,
     and who ever now brings forth seeds out of the hardest wood with unimaginable power;
who formed Adam from the dust of the earth, and forming woman from his side,
     joined her and him in matrimony,
and for the sake of growing future generations,
     gave them perpetual progeny and a blessing, saying:
"Be fruitful and multiply, 

     and fill the earth 

          and have dominion over the birds of the air 

          and the fish of the sea 

          and beasts too, of all kinds;" 

who extraordinarily made Abraham the Patriarch and his wife Sarah fertile, 

     granting the elderly pair offspring unexpectedly 

     despite their advanced age;
who also, with the Holy Spirit, 

     sent your son, our Lord Jesus Christ, 

     from your bosom to the womb of the immaculate Virgin,
so that he might lie hidden in the pregnant woman 

     as in a house in accordance with the human law,
and after the proper nine months of service, 

     as if heaving his bedroom, 

     with hs birth he leaves the Virgin's womb,
who furthermore, through that son, 

     and with twelve Apostles and other Christians,

made a promise, saying,

"Whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you;" 

through that son, 

just as through the Holy Spirit,

I pray to you, God the Father,
     that the aid of your pity might extend to your pregnant servant,
          heavy with child,

     so that she may prevail in producing a child pleasing to you,

     without danger of death,
     and in nourishing a child worthy of serving you
          and devoted to worshipping you. 

By our same Lord, etc.

-- Anonymous (translated from Latin by Runqi Zhang). From a medieval manuscript known as the Marston Book of Hours, originally from England. While the original manuscript is dated from 1250, this prayer is believed to have been added later, in the 4th century. Found at the Global Medieval Sourcebook: A Digital Repository of Medieval Texts, at Stanford University.

As noted in the Introduction:

"Childbirth in medieval Europe was often the most dangerous experience of a woman's life. Because of poor hygiene and a lack of gynecological knowledge, scholars have estimated that as many as ten percent of women died during childbirth or immediately afterwards. Not only did mothers die in large numbers, but as many as thirty percent of children died in the process of childbirth. In the face of these dangers, medieval people used a wide variety of charms and prayers in an attempt to improve their chances of a successful delivery.

"The Marston Childbirth Prayer is a late 14th-century childbirth prayer from England, written in Latin. This prayer provides rare insight into the life of a medieval woman, speaking directly to one of the most intimate and dangerous experiences of her life.

"The prayer draws primarily on three stories from the Christian Bible: the creation of the world, the conception of Isaac, and the conception and birth of Christ. The first part of the prayer focuses on God's generative power: the creation of land and sea, plants and animals, and Adam and Eve. The next part recalls the birth of Isaac, focusing on the miraculous fertility of Abraham and Sarah despite their advanced ages. The prayer then turns to the conception and birth of Jesus, focusing both on Mary's pregnant body and on the divine nature of her son. The three biblical narratives referenced in Marston MS 22 are all concerned with generation and are the three main foundation stories in Christianity: the birth of the world, the birth of Judaism (through Isaac, the grandfather of the twelve tribes of Israel), and the birth of Christianity (through Christ). The prayer concludes with a reminder of Christ's promise that God would intervene on behalf of those who cry out in his name. This allows the prayer, in its final lines, to petition for both mother and child to survive the pregnancy.

"Of key interest here is the way this prayer may have been used to aid a woman in childbirth. By reminding her of the biblical birthing narratives, it links the individual medieval woman with her broader Christian community and the longer arc of Christian history. In this way, the woman may feel connected to the biblical mothers it mentions and draw confidence that she, too, will be able to safely give birth."

Citation: Anonymous. "Marston Childbirth Prayer." Trans. Runqi Zhang. Global Medieval Sourcebook. http://sourcebook.stanford.edu/text/marston-childbirth-prayer. Retrieved on August 1, 2023.

     

This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John (Poem 45)

Sad, sick, and lame, as in my bed I lay,
Lest pain and passion should bear all the sway,
My thoughts being free, I bid them take their flight
Above the gloomy shades of death and night.
They, overjoyed with such a large commission,
Flew instantly, without all intermission,
Up to that sphere where night’s pale queen doth run
Round the circumference of the illustrious sun.
Her globious body spacious was, and bright;
That half alone that from Sol’s beams had light;
The other was immured in shades of night.
Nor did she seem to me as poets feign:
Guiding her chariot with a silver rein,
Attired like some fair nymph or virgin queen,
With naked neck and arms and robes of green.
Lovesick Endymion oft hath thus her seen;
But as my thoughts about her orb was hurled,
I did perceive she was another world.
Thus being in my fancy raised so far,
This world appeared to me another star;
And as the moon a shadow casts and light,
So is our Earth the empress of their night.
Next, Venus, usher to the night and day,
Her full-faced beauty to me did display;
Sometimes she wanéd, then again increase,
Which in our humors cause or war or peace.
My fancy next to Mercury would run,
But craftily he popped behind the sun.
A wonder ’tis, the medium being so bright,
His splendency should be obscured by light.
Nor could I Sol’s refulgent orb descry:
His radiant beams dazzled my tender eye;
And now my wonder is again renewed,
That he, enlightening all, could not be viewed.
Yet to my reason this appeared the best:
That he the center was of all the rest
The planets, all like bowls still trundling round
The vast circumference of his glorious mound;
He, resting, quickens all with heat and light,
And by the Earth’s motion makes our day or night.
Next Jupiter, that mild auspicious star:
I did perceive about his blazing car
Four bright attendants always hurried round;
Next flagrant Mars, where no such moons are found;
Then Saturn (whose aspects so sads my soul)
About whose orb two sickly Cynthias roll;
Then on the fixed stars I would have gazed,
But their vast brightness so my mind amazed
That my affrighted fancy downward flew
Just as the Hours Aurora’s curtain drew,
At which the ugly wife of Acheron
Bid drive, and slashed her drowsy monsters on;
With her there went her firstborn brat, old Error,
And fierce Eumenides, poor mortals’ terror,
Who with their snakes, and whips, and brands, were hurled
To strike amazement to the lower world;
Being scared themselves at the approach of light,
To our antipodes they took their flight.
Sin’s curséd offspring with their dam did trace,
That most prodigious, incestuous race:
Pale, ghastly, shuddering Horror, lost Despair,
And sobbing Sorrow, tearing off her hair:
These of her sable womb were born and bred,
And from the light with her now frighted fled;
And then my maids my window curtains drew,
And, as my pain, so comforts did renew.
Unto the God of truth, light, life, and love,
I’ll such lays here begin shall end above.

-- Hester Pulter (nee Ley; pen-name Hadassah) (1605-1678), English poet who wrote extensively about childbirth and marriage. Located at The Pulter Project from Northwestern University. Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall. Found at https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ae/this-was-written-in-1648-when-i-lay-in-with-my-son-john/ 

Headnote for this poem:

Paralyzed on what might be your death bed, what could you do but think? Pulter—immobile after delivering her fifteenth child—defies paralysis and pain by exerting paradoxical control over her otherwise free thoughts: free from all but her bidding, anyhow. With god-like power she commands their almost angelic flight beyond the sickroom, first to join the speeding orbit of the moon. From this vantage, her astronomical discoveries counter other poetic claims: Pulter’s moon is no mythological goddess, for instance, but “another world” from which the Earth itself appears (quite radically) to be a moon. Her fancy spirals further yet to other astral bodies on which her reasoning proves informed by recent science; by dawn, however, the very illuminations of this flight of fancy prove overwhelming, and her dazzled thoughts are curtailed to her curtained bedroom, just as a classicized Night is driven out with her allegorical children (Error, Horror, Despair, Sorrow), all terrified of the coming light. The poem ends with an early modern version of that most paradoxical of endings: “To be continued…”—in this case, a promise underwritten by Pulter’s dedication of such verse to the deity whose various lights she is by turns informed, delighted, and frightened by.

As noted in the introduction about her:

Pulter gave birth to eight daughters and seven sons over the course of almost a quarter of a century (between 1624 and 1648). Evidence from the poems suggests more than one of these pregnancies and births was associated with periods of serious illness and associated confinement. All but two of these fifteen children predeceased Pulter, and a number of their deaths are mourned in her verse. Her own death is also anticipated and indeed often welcomed in many poems as a relief from earthly suffering, both physical (in references to her sick and aging body) and mental (not only grief but a more general melancholy and anxious insomnia). Pulter’s poems also show her taking comfort in a God roughly recognizable as the one endorsed by the Church of England, a spiritual position conforming neatly with her secular politics, or even inseparable from them. Theologically, her focus is most frequently on eschatology: especially her own eventual reunion with her soul and God in heaven at the Day of Judgment, long after her death and (often vividly imagined) corporeal dissolution.

Image: A Birth Scene (Lying In), Master of Charles of Durazzo (Francesco_di_Michele)  c. 1410 Harvard Art Museum

Junius Childbirth Charm (Medieval)

The Virgin Mary gave birth to Christ. The infertile Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist. I urge you, child, whether you are male or female, but the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit, to come out and move beyond. Mat you not harm the child or make him foolish. Amen. The Lord, seeing the wailing sisters of Lazarus, wept in front of the tomb. In the presence of the Jews, he exclaimed, "Lazarus, come out!" And he who had been dead for four days came out with his hands and feet bound.

Write this in wax which has never been worked on and bind it under her right foot.

--Anonymous, English and Latin text, 11th century, translated by Runqi Zhang. Found at the Global Medieval Sourcebook: A Digital Repository of Medieval Texts, at Stanford University.

From the introduction:

"Childbirth in medieval Europe was often the most dangerous experience of a woman's life. Because of poor hygiene and a lack of gynecological knowledge, scholars have estimated that as many as ten percent of women died during childbirth or immediately afterwards. Not only did mothers die in large numbers, but as many as thirty percent of children died in the process of childbirth. In the face of these dangers, medieval people used a wide variety of charms and prayers in an attempt to improve their chances of a successful delivery.

The charm presented here was composed in England in the eleventh century CE and is an example of a “peperit charm”. The name comes from the Latin word peperit (“gave birth to”). This word occurs frequently in these charms, because they list the biblical women who gave birth to children. Indeed, a peperit charm can be identified by its sequence of holy mothers, one of the most widespread motifs in medieval childbirth charms. Typically, as is the case here, a peperit charm will invoke the names of holy mothers one by one. Some examples will contain other formulations, whether to add to the functions to the charm or to enhance its effects. This charm contains three additional features that can be found in other childbirth charms: an appeal to the unborn child to leave the womb; the account of Lazarus’s resurrection with its climactic words, “Lazarus, come forth!”; instructions for how to turn the prayer into an amulet that the laboring woman can wear on her body.

In the case of the Junius Peperit Charm, the instructions for turning the prayer into an amulet state that the charm should be written on wax that has never been used before and bound to the woman’s right foot. The requirement for unworked wax (also known as “virgin” wax) is interesting, seeming to emphasize the sacramental quality of the prayer. The instruction to attach the prayer to the pregnant woman's body suggests that there was a hope that she could connect with its content in an embodied way, drawing on its power to support her own body during childbirth.

In comparison to childbirth prayers, an example of which is presented in this collection https://sourcebook.stanford.edu/text/marston-childbirth-prayer, this charm has minimal narrative content, focusing instead on the invocation of biblical names. It is quite possible that this charm, or at least the first part of it, would have been repeatedly chanted during a woman's labor. Hearing the familiar names of biblical mothers might have served to calm and encourage the laboring woman, reassuring her that she too could deliver her child safely.

Citation: Anonymous. "Junius Childbirth Charm." Trans. Runqi Zhang. Global Medieval Sourcebook. http://sourcebook.stanford.edu/text/junius-childbirth-charm. Retrieved on August 1, 2023.

Parturition

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pinpoint nucleus of being

Locate an irritation              without
It is                                              within
                                                       Within
It is without
The sensitized area
Is identical                with the extensity
Of intension

I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait painter
Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment
Sings
          “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly
          All the girls are nice
          Whether they wear their hair in curls
          Or —”
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception                        Brute
Why?
         The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority.
He is running upstairs

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of

Repose
Which never comes.
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation

Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life

For consciousness in crises            races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes

Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?
A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life
LIFE
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted Maternity
Against my thigh
Tough of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth              moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me

The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
     With infinite Maternity
     Indivisible
     Acutely
     I am absorbed
     Into
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat

Rises from the sub-conscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue bottles
—Epicurean—
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about


     Unfolding


The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware

I once heard in a church
—Man and woman God made them—
                                                         Thank God.

-- Mina Loy (1882-1966), radical British painter and Futurist poet, written in 1914.

Image: Motherhood, by Dorothea Tanning (surrealist), oil on canvas, 1947

Before the Birth of One of Her Children

All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,
We are both ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These o protect from step Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.

-- Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), British born American Puritan poet; first woman poet to gain acclaim in the New World and New England. She emigrated to America in 1630 with her father and her husband aboard the Arbella and settled in Ipswich, MA. She bore eight children between 1632-1655. From her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.

The Pool

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?

-- H. D. (1886-1961), Hilda Doolittle, memoirist, novelist, essayist, and modernist poet written as she expected her first child in 1915.

Waking with Russell

Whatever the difference is, it all began

the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I’d rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

--Don Paterson (1963- ), Scottish poet, writer musician, and winner of the T. S. Eliot prize.

For a discussion of this poem, see here.

"Mezzo del Cammin" means middle aged and lacking direction.

The Pool

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?

-- H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961), American poet, novelist, essayist, and translator.; LGBTQ pioneer. This poem was written while she was expecting her first child with husband Richard Aldington.

The Birth

The birth isn’t about poetry
It is about screaming pain on a Sunday
Hailing a cab and head racing
To the hospital, now so close to the new apartment

I had a baby inside of me
But no one expected it to happen so fast
Or then at least they said they didn’t
Maybe they expected it to happen so fast
All along

Alone in the waiting room I shook and shook
And the blood ran down my legs
Later with the magnesium
I thought of the many permutations of the bald head
Pale, pickling fish skin, glowing with scales

When she came out, she was dark and full of hair
No blood, but born in the caul
Like the other magical realities of my past accomplishments
When she came out she cried and it sounded like me
But passed me, into her new reality

Now 3 weeks later, they say I am still not an erotic object
So I wander the park in the snow with my friend
We light candles and pray to the darkness
We light the park on fire and the police come and find us

When they take us to the jail, I say no, it’s not right
I am a mother after all
They say, but where is your baby
And I say, no no, my baby my baby
They say, yes yes, look at your beautiful baby

I say, I do, I do
Look, look, and listen
My baby my baby
She’s here

--Dorothea Lasky (1978- ), St. Louis-born poet and professor of poetry at Columbia University

Song for Baby-O, Unborn

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever

-- Diane Di Prima (19340-2020), feminist Beat poet, short-story writer, named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009, and Buddhist.

Ascension

It wasn’t just wind, chasing
thin gunmetal clouds
across the loud sky;
it wasn’t the feeling that one might ascend
on that excited air,
rising like a trumpet note.

And it wasn’t just my sister’s water breaking,
her crying out,
the downward draw of blood and bone….

It was all of that,
the mud and new grass
pushing up through melting snow,
the lilac in bud
by my front door, bent low
by last week’s ice storm.

Now the new mother, that leaky vessel,
begins to nurse her child,
beginning the long good-bye.


--Kathleen Norris (1947- ), Benedictine oblate , poet, and essayist

My Second Birth

That first birth
when I pushed myself
free of her
and burst out
into invisible air
is as lost to me
as the months I floated
in that ocean of unbroken thought.

But passing on
the birth she gave me
has made me see Mama
face to face.

I understand now
what she means when she says
she loves me:
It's the place you get to
when you've pushed
to the other side of pain.

A light grew in my belly
until my husband
could warm his hands by it.
I gave our son my broken sleep,
the fists, hands, fists, hands, fists
I made when he woke me
from my dream about his name.

I gave birth to him awed
by his apple-round head
in the bright glass above my knees.
I was given new strength
when he crowned
and my blood burst
like a chain of jewels
around his neck.

Mama 
was my first image of God.
I remember how she leaned over my crib,
her eyes full of sky.

--Marilyn Nelson (1946- ), African American poet, translator, and children's. book author, from The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems, 1997.



Photo: My mom and my siblings, ca 1970. I am on the left, sucking my thumb and having been forced to relinquish my spot on her lap to the interlopers.

Invocation to Convince a Baby Already Twelve Days Overdue to Come Out of the Womb

It's May. This is the month wild with choices.
You can rush into the strolling sunshine
to join forsythia bursting like popcorn,
and weeping cherry, and the woodthrush whose song
pulsed in southlight this morning.

Come with your hands open or shut.
Come with them slippery from blood.
Don't be afraid. Only slide down a cascade of water.
Come with your eyes azure as a piece of sky.
Or come with eyes a dark complication of gray.

Come trailing the leftover placenta.
Come with vernix like wax over pale new cheese.
Come with no clothes but the color rose
which quickens your flesh.
Come skinny or fat.

Come with hair black as a grand piano.
The count is up now, the game is over.
Come home to this small room.
You'll be as free
and as bound as the star that's framed

tonight in the window above your empty crib.

--Jeanne Murray Walker (1944- ), American poet and playwright, from Poetry magazine, May 1987, p. 92



On this day, 24 years ago, my firstborn was officially past her due date.  She would have to be induced 8 days later.