A Prayer for My Daughter

To read the original poem click here,

A Prayer for my Daughter by William Butler Yeats, the poem is related with his another poem "The Second Coming" which is written just few months before this poem. 

Poem opens with the image of a new-born child sleeping in a cradle. A storm is raging with great fury outside his residence. A great gloom is on Yeats’ mind and is consumed with anxiety as to how to protect his child from the tide of hard times ahead. The poet keeps walking and praying for the young child. 

Poet feels a kind of gloom and worry about the future of his daughter. He says
“As I walk and pray for my younger daughter, I imagine in a state of 
excitement and reverie” 
that the future years have already come and that they seem to come dancing to the accompaniment of a drum which is beating frantically.

In the first stanza child is sleeping in the cradle and the hood of the cradle half-covers it.  A furious storm coming from the Atlantic ocean batters everything outside the house. imagines the storm as a symbol of the unraveling difficult times. He is deeply apprehensive about Anne’s upbringing. 

The second stanza poet's sense of worry about her daughter is continuous and keeps on walking. or about an hour. The weather, as conjured by his nervous mind, is violent and destructive. Some forces is imagined as the “Flooded stream” that is going to wash away everything on its way. the author invokes optimism and a permanent respite from the doom and gloom of the prevailing difficult days.

In the third stanza poet imagine about his daughter as she grows as a beautiful damsel.  But he does not like her to be a paragon of beauty. In Yeats’s view, extreme beauty could be harmful and ruinous for a woman. Beauty often misleads the beholder by giving a false sense and may be the resulting arrogance may rob her of kindness. In the fourth stanza Yeats recounts the miserable fate that befell the Helen of Troy and Venus. Both were immensely beatiful, but carried huge load of curse and suffering.

In the next stanza poet determines are very important womanly qualities such as courtesy, or kindness and civility. He asserts that men adore women who exude charm, kindness and gentle manners. In the sixth stanza poet hopes that his daughter grows up to embody wisdom, joy and reticence and wants her to live in a protected place, away from gloom, danger and destruction.

In the seventh stanza mind is “dried up of late”, which is weathering away. His mind hates doomed because the smouldering cinders of hatred consume the noble creativity of mind. In the next stanza poet unravels his feelings relating to the woman who spurned his love four times, 

Maud Gonne according to Yeats she was a gifted woman, who was showered with gifts from “Plenty’s horn”.

In the ninth stanza he constantly hopes that his daughter grows beautiful as Maud, but not arrogance like her. He wants his daughter to submit to Heaven’s will with a smiling face. 

In the last stanza poem ends with an imaginary climax, poet as a loving father he imagined about his daughters marriage. He wants that she goes happily her husband's home and set norms of customs. He closes his prayer by returning to the image of the horn and the tree, as sources of custom. 

Yeats as father imagine many such things about his daughter and he wants that his daughter grows as a beautiful woman but she never forget the roots of her. 

Thank you...