A Prayer for My Daughter / 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. The poem reflects Yeats's complicated views on Irish Nationalism, sexuality, and is considered an important work of Modernist poetry.

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 describes the Irish War of Independence, overshadows the birth of Yeats's daughter and creates the political frame that sets the text into historical context. In stanza two, the setting for the poem is revealed as being a "tower", a setting for many of Yeats's poems including the book of poems titled The Tower published in 1928. 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.

Structure
The poem itself contains ten stanzas of eight lines each. The first two lines of each stanza form a rhyming couplet, but the following lines of each stanza alternate rhyme schemes throughout the poem. 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.

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.