Prayer for My Daughter
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The poem “Prayer for My Daughter” is written by William Butler Yeats for his daughter, Anna Butler Yeats. The poem was written two days after her birth and is a solemn prayer to God. The poem is about poets aspirations for his daughter which would eventually make her a good human being in the future. Yeats felt that the world was becoming barbaric and violent and he wanted to safeguard his daughter from the anger of second coming. He felt that it was also the end of the Christian Era. The change in gender roles during that time and the violence inspired him to write the poem.
The poem begins with a howling storm which seems to be destroying everything. The wind is so strong that it reveals haystacks and rooftops. In this storm, poets daughter is lying in her cradle, unprotected. The only thing protecting the poet and his daughter from the devastating storm is a bare hill and Gregorys Estate in Cool Park. The storm is a metaphor for the tumult or upheaval in Europe during that time. The poet seems disturbed and he is praying for his daughter for the wind is so strong that it is churning the water thus flooding the stream. He is so agitated and apprehensive that he assumes that the storm is the approach of the future years. The reference of the flooded stream is a biblical reference to the Great Flood which ended the civilization and only gods few chosen people were saved. The future in this extract is personified to a dancer dancing on a wild beat. The storm is an indication of unpromising and unhappy future which is dangerous and frightening and as a father, the poet is anxious for his daughters coming years.
His first prayer for his daughter is that she be made beautiful but not so beautiful that her beauty becomes a reason of discomfort and stress to a stranger. He believes that if she were gifted excessive beauty, she would become vain as according to him, those who are gifted excessive beauty consider it the end means of their lives. Due to excessive beauty, they lose natural kindness and warmth and the capacity to form close relations with other individuals. In this extract, perhaps, the poet is referring to Maud Gonne, the woman who was very deeply loved by the poet and who was excessively beautiful and who rejected the poet several times thus denying his passionate love for her. He illustrates a few examples of those women who considered beauty as the sole reason for their existence. He gives the example of Helen of Troy who was endowed with great beauty. She found her life dull and boring after her marriage to Menelaus and she later fell in love with Paris, Prince of Troy. As a result of her extreme beauty, a ten year long battle was fought. He also gives us the example of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love who was formed from the foam of the sea. As she was fatherless, there was no one to guide her in the right direction and she did everything according to her own will and she eventually chose to marry a lame and crippled Blacksmith of Gold, Hephaestus.
The poet believed that greatly beautiful women