Baby Song — Thom Gunn
Birth Through a Newborn's Eyes
Thom Gunn (1929-2004) gives the whole of Baby Song to a single speaking voice: a newborn baby, recalling in its own words the shock of being born. The poem is written as a persona poem. In just fourteen lines the baby moves from remembering ‘the private ease of Mother’s womb’ to describing how it fell ‘into the lighted room’ of the world outside.
The baby's first reaction to being born is not joy but complaint. It asks ‘Why don’t they simply put me back,’ treating birth as an unwanted removal rather than an arrival worth celebrating. Gunn gives an ordinarily silent, powerless creature a confident, opinionated voice, and the gap between the baby’s real helplessness and its assured complaining tone runs through the whole poem.
The baby remembers the womb through cosy, physical comforts. It was ‘warm and wet and black’, and inside it the baby was ‘padded and jolly’ and could ‘ride the perfect comfort of her inside’. Every memory of the womb is warm and gentle; every description of the new world outside is harsh by comparison.
That contrast is the poem’s main theme: separation from a place of total safety into a world that feels sudden, bright and uncontrolled. The new world is described in the opposite terms to the womb — the room is ‘lighted’ rather than dark, and the baby is placed in a ‘rustling bed’ where it lies ‘raging, small, and red’. The change is total: even colour and temperature reverse.
Gunn writes the whole poem in rhyming couplets, giving fourteen lines and seven pairs of rhymes. The steady beat recalls a nursery rhyme or lullaby — a sound usually associated with soothing a baby, which sits oddly against the baby’s own complaints. Gunn uses enjambment sparingly: most lines are end-stopped with commas or full stops, matching short, blunt statements to short, blunt lines.
The couplet form also lets Gunn build the poem through paired contrasts. Comfort is followed by complaint; memory of the womb is followed by the present reality of the cot. Each couplet works almost like a small step in an argument, moving the baby’s case forward line by line, so that the tight, controlled form contains an increasingly urgent, uncontrolled feeling.
The poem’s final couplet raises the stakes further. Birth itself is remembered violently: ‘A rain of blood poured round her womb’ ties the baby’s personal complaint to the physical reality of labour. The very last line — ‘But all time roars outside this room’ — turns the baby’s cot into a fragile boundary against an overwhelming outside world, using the idea of roaring noise to suggest chaos on a huge scale.
The baby predicts its own memory will fade — ‘I may sleep soon, I may forget’ — but insists one feeling will survive: ‘I won’t forget that I regret.’ This is a paradox: the baby claims it will forget everything except the fact of its own unforgettable regret. Gunn uses this to suggest that an early shock can leave a lasting mark even without a conscious memory of the event itself.
Gunn builds this whole poem from physical opposites. Dark is set against ‘the lighted room’; the padded comfort of the womb is set against a bed the baby only calls ‘rustling’; total safety is set against a world that ‘roars’. Nothing about the new world is neutral — every detail the baby notices confirms that something has been lost.
Three anthology poems make especially useful revision pairings for Baby Song. In You’re, Sylvia Plath also writes about a very young child, but her tone is playful and affectionate rather than resentful — comparing the two shows how tone changes completely depending on whether the baby itself, or an adoring parent, is speaking. In My First Weeks, Sharon Olds narrates early infancy from later in life and calls it ‘heaven’, the opposite verdict to Gunn’s regretful baby — a comparison of method would show how similar physical details, like feeding and warmth, can support two completely opposite readings of the same early experience. In Love, Kate Clanchy also describes the shocking fragility of a newborn, but from a frightened new parent’s point of view rather than the baby’s own voice, which is useful for comparing whose perspective controls a poem’s tone. Prayer, by Zaffar Kunial, is also worth knowing: it links a birth to a mother, but where Gunn’s baby resents separation from its mother, Kunial’s speaker connects his own birth to his mother’s later death, a pairing that would draw out how differently poets can treat birth as something shared between two people rather than experienced alone.
Because Baby Song is short and its lines are easy to remember exactly, it is a strong choice for the second part of the poetry question, where no poem is printed and you must supply your own quotations from memory. If it appears as the printed poem in the first part instead, look closely at what its paired unseen poem does with early life, separation or a parent’s voice, and track ideas and attitudes, tone and atmosphere, and the effects of language and form across both poems together, rather than writing about them one after another.