A prayer for my daughter By-William butler Yeats

A prayer for my daughter

  By-William butler Yeats

 

 "A Prayer for my Daughter" is a poem by William Butler Yeats written in 1919 and published in 1921 as part of Yeats' collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. It is written to Anne, the daughter of Yeats and Georgie Hyde Lees, whom Yeats married after his last marriage proposal to Maud Gonne was rejected in 1916.[ Yeats wrote the poem while staying in a tower at Thoor Ballylee during the Anglo-Irish War, two days after Anne's birth on February 26, 1919.[2] The poem reflects Yeats's complicated views on Irish Nationalism, sexuality, and is considered an important work of Modernist poetry.

 

Contents

1. background-

The poem begins by describing a "storm" which is "howling", and his newborn daughter, sleeping "half hid" in her cradle, thus protected somewhat from the storm. The storm, which can in part be read as symbolizing the Irish War of Independence, overshadows the birth of Yeats's daughter and creates the political frame that sets the text into historical context.[4] In stanza two, the setting for the poem is revealed as being "the tower", a setting for many of Yeats's poems including the book of poems titled The Tower published in 1928. This is Thoor Ballylee, an ancient Norman tower in Galway, which Yeats had bought in 1917 and where he intended making a home. Conflicts between Ireland and the United Kingdom were common subjects of Yeats's poetry as he wrote famous poems about the Dublin Lockout ("September 1913") and the Easter Rising ("Easter 1916").David Holdeman suggests that the poem "carries over from 'The Second Coming'" in the tone it uses to describe the political situation facing Ireland at the end of World War One the formation of the Irish Republican Army.

 

 

 

2. structure-

The poem itself contains ten stanzas of eight lines each: two rhymed couplets followed by a quatrain of enclosed rhyme. Many of the rhyme pairs use slant rhyme. The stanza may be seen as a variation on ottava rima, an eight-lined stanza used in other Yeats poems such as Among School Children and Sailing to Byzantium.

Metrical analysis of the poem, according to Robert Einarsson, proves difficult because he believes Yeats adheres to "rhythmical motifs" rather than traditional use of syllables in his meter. In stanza two, Einarsson points out instances where the meter of the poem contains examples of amphibrachic, pyrrhicretic, and spondaic feet, and he argues that the complexity of Yeats's verse follows patterns of its "metremes", or rhymical motifs, rather than common metrical devices.

The poem also may be read to consist of straightforward iambic verse that relies on common metrical devices such as elision, acephalous lines, promotion, and metrical inversion. Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 of each stanza are iambic pentameter; lines 4, 6, and 7 are iambic tetrameter. For instance, using traditional principles of scansion, stanza two may be scanned as shown below, where syllables in all caps represent metrical beats, lower-case syllables represent metrical off-beats, the vertical bar represents the termination of a metrical foot, and apostrophes represent elisions. The number of metrical feet per line is marked in parentheses at the end of each line:

 

I'ave WALKED | and PRAYED | for THIS | young CHILD | an HOUR (5) and HEARD | the SEA- | wind SCREAM | upON | the TOWER, (5) and UND- | er th'ARCH- | es OF | the BRIDGE, | and SCREAM (5) in th'ELMS | aBOVE | the FLOOD- | ed STREAM; (4) imAG- | 'ning IN | exCIT- | ed REV- | erIE (5) THAT | the FUT- | ure YEARS | had COME, (4) DANC- | ing TO | a FRENZ- | ied DRUM, (4) OUT of | the MURD- | 'rous INN- | ocence OF | the SEA. (5)

 

 

3. Critical reception-

As the poem reflects Yeats's expectations for his young daughter, feminist critques of the poem have questioned the poet's general approach to women through the text's portrayal of women in society. In Yeats's Ghosts, Brenda Maddox suggests that the poem is "designed deliberately to offend women" and labels it as "offensive". Maddox argues that Yeats, in the poem, condemns his daughter to adhere to 19th Century ideals of womanhood as he focuses on her need for a husband and a "Big House" with a private income.

Joyce Carol Oates questions the use of a poem to deprive his daughter of sensuality after Yeats's rejected marriage proposal to Maud Gonne presents a "crushingly conventional" view of womanhood, wishing her to become a "flourishing hidden tree" instead of allowing her the freedoms given to male children, Yeats's, In Oates's opinion, wishes his daughter to become like a "vegetable:immobile, unthinking, and placid."

Majorie Elizabeth Howes, in Yeats's Nations suggests that the crisis facing the Anglo-Irish community in "A Prayer for My Daughter" is that of female sexual choice. However, Howes argues that to read the poem without the political context surrounding the Irish Revolution robs the text of a deeper meaning that goes beyond the relationship between Yeats and the female sex.

 

 

                       POEM

 

 

        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 great 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.

 

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,

Being fatherless could have her way

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 courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;

Hearts are not had as a 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.

 

May she become a flourishing hidden 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.

O may she live like some green laurel

Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

 

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?

 

Considering 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 bellows 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 a name for the rich horn,

And custom for the spreading laurel tree.