A Prayer for My Daughter by W. B. Yeats

 William Butler Yeats 

William Butler Yeats was an influential Irish poet, playwright, writer, nationalist, and a key figure in 20th-century literature. He contributed to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory and led the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 and served as a Senator for the Irish Free State. 

Born in Sandymount, Ireland, Yeats was a Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent. His father was a lawyer and portrait painter. Educated in Dublin and London, he spent holidays in County Sligo. From a young age, he was interested in poetry, Irish legends, and the occult. His early poetry, influenced by John Keats, William Wordsworth, and others, is characterized by slow-paced and lyrical verses, reflecting his early influences and interests.

A Prayer for My Daughter Summary

In "A Prayer for my Daughter," W.B. Yeats worries about raising his daughter in turbulent times after the war, especially in politically unsettled Ireland. He wants her to have a life filled with beauty, innocence, safety, and security. He hopes she'll be polite, humble, and free from strong opinions or intellectual hatred. Ultimately, he wishes for her to marry into a noble family with deep spiritual and traditional values.

Analysis of Poem 

Yeats wrote this poem shortly after the birth of his first daughter in 1919. The poem expresses Yeats' hopes and prayers for the kind of person he wants his daughter to become. He begins by describing a fierce storm raging outside while his newborn daughter sleeps peacefully, suggesting the turbulent world she has been born into.

Yeats hopes his daughter will have beauty, but not a beauty that makes "a stranger's eye distraught".  He wants her to have an inner grace and courtesy along with her outward beauty. He gives examples of beautiful women from mythology like Helen of Troy and Venus who allowed their beauty to make them vain or lead them into trouble. 

Yeats wants his daughter to be free from hatred and the soul to recover its "radical innocence." He hopes she will have a strong, integrated sense of self where her own "sweet will is heaven's will." He wishes her to have wisdom, charm, and courtesy as the highest virtues of a truly beautiful woman. The poem is written in a lyric form with 10 stanzas of 8 lines each in an intricate rhyme scheme. The meter alternates between iambic and trochaic pentameter lines. Yeats employs many poetic devices like symbolism, personification, paradox, and vivid sonic devices like alliteration, sibilance and onomatopoeia.

To conclude, it is a prayer expressing Yeats' highest hopes for his daughter to develop inner beauty, wisdom and self-possession in the face of the troubled, post-war world she was born into. He wants her to avoid the pitfalls that physical beauty alone can bring.

Thank you.