William Butler Yeats became a father in his fifties when his first child, a daughter, Anne, was born on February,19, 1919. Shortly after her birth, he wrote “A Prayer for my Daughter,” in which he expresses what kind of woman he would like his daughter to become. He enumerates the qualities he believes a woman should possess and the temperament and tendencies she should avoid. Ultimately he envisions her snugly ensconced in domestic bliss, protected by a financially prosperous husband. My summary could make readers wonder, “Why bother reading this poem? It sounds simplistic and sexist (an anachronistic view).” But such reactions would deny one the opportunity to experience a poem richly lyrical and perceptively personal.
As all poems, “A Prayer for my Daughter” should first be read as a whole and aloud to feel its rhythms and to visualize its imagery. Then the poem can be considered two stanzas at a time, since Yeats sculps his stanzas into coordinated pairs. Reading the opening verses of stanzas 1 and 2, the sensitive reader cannot help but share the dread and dismay that fills Yeats’s mind as he sees and hears the fierce storm raging without:
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour,
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come
Dancing to a frenzied drum
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
The overt content of these stanzas is the storm battering the tower where he lived shortly after the horrors of the First World War and during the Irish War of Independence. These terrible events, no doubt, underlie the imagery and emotion that inform Yeats’s contemplation of what future awaits his daughter. The future years haunt him as he imagines them rising “Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.” Interestingly, these lines echo “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” from the poem “The Second Coming,” which directly precedes “A Prayer for my Daughter” in Michael Robartes and the Dancer.” The fanatical violence and bloodshed that engulfed the world understandably darkened Yeats’s imagination.
In stanzas 3 and 4, Yeats identifies specific characteristics he want for his daughter not to possess:
May she be granted beauty, and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass; for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness, and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Helen, being chosen, found life flat and dull,
And later had much trouble from a fool;
While that great Queen that rose out of the spray,
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.
In “Adam’s Curse,” a “beautiful mild woman” (Maud Gonne) said, “To be born woman is to know/…That we must labour to be beautiful.” But what comes of such “labour,” especially when it is “Being made beautiful overmuch,” and becomes “a sufficient end” in itself? Such women can “Lose natural kindness,” and that quality of “heart-revealing intimacy/That chooses right, and never find a friend” that Yeats prays his daughter will have. This consequence of being too beautiful is exemplified in stanza 4 by Helen and Aphrodite.
Courtesy, rather than perfect beauty, emerges as the supreme quality that Yeats wants his daughter to possess. However, no one is endowed with this quality; it must be acquired:
In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as gift, but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful.
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise;
And many a poor man that has roved,”
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
Once “courtesy” is “earned,” and “charm [has] made wise,” a woman’s beauty becomes subordinate to her far greater and lasting virtue of the “glad kindness” that makes “a poor man” feel “himself beloved.”
In Stanza 6, Yeats contemplates a mythical, harmonious world for his daughter to inhabit:
May she become a flourishing tree,
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound;
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
Oh, may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
Some readers disparage this stanza and Yeats as terribly misogynistic. Joyce Carol Oates, for example, claims “This celebrated poet would have his daughter an object of nature for others’--which is to say male–delectation. She is not even an animal or bird in his imagination, but a vegetable: immobile, unthinking, placid, ‘hidden’. But Oates’s anger distorts her reading of the poem and consequently she does not see the “flourishing tree” as the metaphor of the tree of life that has flourished in poetry through time. Moreover, Yeats longs for his daughter’s mind to be imbued with the thoughts and language of poetry rather than the rhetoric and zeal of politics. Stanzas 7 and 8 illustrate this point.
My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?
It is clear that Yeats wants to protect his infant daughter not only from the elements of the howling storm, but also from the elemental hatred that had filled his first love, Maud Gonne with an implacable, fierce “angry wind.”
In stanza 9 Yeats reasons that being free of an “opinionated mind” will accord his daughter her “own sweet will,” recover “radical innocence,” and “be happy still” no matter what tempest, person, social or natural, buffets her in her life. In stanza 10, Yeats concludes his vision of her future by enveloping her in a final protective covering of domestic security.
Consider that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is heaven’s will,
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellow burst, be happy still.
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
There are readers who object to the last stanza as misogynistic. Besides this anachronistic understanding of the poem, such a reading fails to observe the important dichotomy in the verse. As expressed through the entire poem, Yeats recognizes the grace and purity of innocence and believes (quite correctly) that the “arrogance and hatred…peddled…in the thoroughfares'' can destroy that innocence unless something, in this case, ceremony and custom, protects it. And once innocence is destroyed, poetry too will perish.