Prayer for My Daughter

834 Words4 Pages
A Prayer For My Daughter. The poem ‘Prayer for my Daughter’ is a prayer for his daughter. When his daughter Anne Butler was born, naturally Yeats's thoughts turned towards her. Georgie had cast her astrological horoscope and predicted that the child would be famous and beautiful. Yeats knew that excessive beauty had brought in its wake suffering and tragedy, as in the case of Helen of Troy and Maud Gonne. With such experience the poet articulates his prayer which describes the ideal life that he hopes his daughter will live. The aspirations of the father, therefore, centre on evolution of a culture and society based on the values of courtesy, innocence, ceremony typified by the metaphors of the horn of plenty and the spreading Laurel tree. The poem powerfully articulates Yeats's romantic longing for the past and his love for an aristocratic civilization. The setting is completely detailed: the noise and movement of the wind, the sleeping child in the cradle, the pacing father. The storm in the physical world is paralleled by the inner commotion in the poet's mind. The violence of the storm so disturbing to the father, does not wake the child who 'sleeps on', ignorant of the threatening violence but vulnerable to it. The poet is very much worried to see everybody dancing to a 'frenzied drum' and the roof of human civilization crumbling and an antithetical civilization based on cruelty, greed and selfishness is about to be ushered in. The poet's sense of his daughter's vulnerability to time prompts his prayer for the protecting gifts he would have her carry into life. Yeats's first prayer is for beauty but this beauty must be tinged with compassion. Yeats discards beauty as that of Maud Gonne and of Helen of Troy because excessive beauty makes a woman incapable of compassion. Again, he thinks of capriciousness with which such
Open Document