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W.B. Yeats “A Prayer for my Daughter”: The ironies of the Paternal Standpoint.

Introduction

‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ by William Butler Yeats starts with an image of the newborn child

sleeping in a cradle. A storm is raging with great fury outside his residence. A great gloom is on

Yeats’ mind and is consumed with anxiety as to how to protect his child from the tide of hard times

ahead. The poet keeps walking and praying for the young child and as he does so he is in a state

of reverie. He feels a kind of gloom and worry about the future of his daughter. This worry means

the paternal care of a father. Anne Butler Yeats, the poet’s first child, was born on February 26,

1919, only a month after William Butler Yeats completed “The Second Coming,” his apocalyptic

vision of violence and anarchy. Four months later, he composed “A Prayer for My Daughter,” in

which he expanded his belief that a return of a person. Because he does not want his daughter to

be too beautiful, the speaker wishes instead for her to be chiefly learned. The poem is concerned

with the chaotic modern world. It shows a father consumed with apprehension for his daughter’s

future in an uncertain political situation. The father is tense about how he can possibly protect his

daughter from the raging storm outside, because she is very beautiful. If his daughter grows up to

be sweet-natured, she will be lucky enough, the speaker hopes, to be brought to an accustomed

ceremonious house by her bridegroom, free of hatred and full of innocence. Therefore, he prays

for her as well as gives advice about how to live successfully on earth. Similarly, modern-day

fathers can send quotes from this poem to their daughters as a piece of advice for special occasions.

This means that he literally or ironically forbade his daughter to follow the path of Maud Gonne

who rejects his love and married a person who is not capable of spreading love like his father.
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Literature Review

The ironies of the first time we see that the poet looks within himself and finds that there is hatred

inside of him. He thinks that hatred kills innocence and wishes that his daughter should not cherish

hatred. It was because of this unwholesome bent of the mind that Maud Gonne married a fool. The

poet wished that her daughter should not cultivate a frantic intellect; he thinks that her daughter

can remain innocent if she is free from hatred and intellectual fanaticism. The innocence is self-

delighting, self-appeasing and self-affrighting. The poet’s last wish is that his daughter should

marry a person of aristocratic family who may take her to a home where tradition and ceremony

fill the atmosphere. Till that he thinks himself as the proper way to raise his child as an ideal father.

According to, Leona Toker (January 1, 1999), “There is moreover a difference between the Middle

marchers dismissively paternalistic attitude to women and an actual father's desire to have his

child protected from that murderous innocence of the sea from that blood dimmed tide which Yeats

's The Second Coming drowns and in a Prayer for My Daughter threatens to drown, the ceremony

of innocence. The impulse of paternal protection works irrespective of the baby's gender, indeed,

it characterizes both A Prayer for my Daughter and A Prayer for My Son. written after the birth

of Yeats's son. The speaker takes on the role of the father who must exert his spirit, in prayer and

best laid plans, to protect his baby from the elements.”

According to, Supriya Mitra (July 7, 2015), “In the poem Yeats wanted his daughter not to be

affected by the evils of this mundane world. His frustration which emerged from the imbalance

between his aspiration and achievement would never disturb the stasis of her daughter’s

equilibrium, for she would be guided by love, simplicity and civic virtues. Yeats could only ‘howl’

like a cloud but never found the rain of love to tranquilize his heart. The philosophic Yeats knows
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that Maud being obsessed with ‘one purpose alone’ neglected and rejected other human qualities.

His personal experience, disillusionment and realization prompt him to pray for his daughter.”

According to, Azim Hossain Imo (January 4, 2018), “The poem is about William Butler Yeats

ideas and his anxiety about his baby daughter's future and life. He wants his daughter to become

a woman who is virtuous, wise. He uses the image of his daughter partly to represent his ideal

woman. Most of the images that he uses are parts of the ideal woman he has in his mind or its

opposites. He supports that a woman should be "a flourishing hidden tree", who is not well-known

but beautiful.”

Discussion or Analysis

From the very beginning the speaker in this poem has a number of wishes for his young daughter

it is shown literally. He would like her to be beautiful but not sufficiently beautiful to make a

stranger's eye delightful nor to make the girl herself pay too much attention to her inner appearance.

Basically, the speaker fears that those who consider beauty a sufficient he or she end will become

less naturally kind which in turn may mean that they have trouble finding intimacy and making

friends. He refers to Helen, an allusion to Helen of Troy, as an example of how being too beautiful

can be a curse rather than a blessing. Only the outer beauty is not a thing that we wish for we need

to find the inner beauty of a mind. Yeats has experience the pain that accompanies great beauty in

a woman, in his love for Maud Gonne an actress and political activist as well. While beautiful, this

woman who he met at twenty-two and wooed for almost thirty years did not have the special

qualities of the woman who Yeats ultimately married, Georgie Hyde Lees. Gonne's beauty brought

her no satisfaction and left Yeats greatly frustrated.

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Yeats shows a sense of hatred for the contemporary world as it is well expressed in his earlier

poem “The Second Coming”. Realizing the evils of the contemporary society Yeats envisions that

the world of love and innocence would no longer be enjoyable and would be fragmented into

numerous pieces- Things fall apart; the center cannot hold’. These two poems are ’matched’

because in both the poet speaks of ‘the soul’s solipsistic knowledge of its own autonomy and is

born only out of ritual, where all are accustomed and ceremonious. But if in “The Second Coming”

the poet envisions the approaching of a new era which is marked by horror and frustration, in this

poem the poet registers a deep nostalgia for the past. Again when “The Second Coming” ends with

the birth of a monstrous beast, “A Prayer for My Daughter” begins with the birth of an innocent

baby. In "A Prayer" Yeats shows his idea of the good life. For this reason, he draws on Aristotelian

as well as Hindu traditions. In the third, fourth and fifth stanzas, he includes physical beauty, good

breeding and material prosperity in his idea of the good life along with love and friendship. The

inclusion of material prosperity has been read as politically conservative and is also contrary to

some traditional Christian understandings of the virtuous life. However, several ancient

philosophers, Greek and Indian, considered material well-being essential to the good life. For

Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, well-being and virtue in the sense of excellence are

composed of more than just right action. Aristotle considers virtue or excellence necessary but not

sufficient for the life of well-being. To live a healthy life good birth and breeding, beauty, love,

friendship, and prosperity are also required. He gains coming in close contact with a beautiful and

accomplished woman who had to give away everything by being strongly biased. The truth rings

clearly in the poet's mind that by removing all hatred from one's mind and the soul not only regains

its innocence but also embarks on the journey of delighting in itself. Since the spirit of the soul is

the will of God, he extremely prays that his daughter should be able to discover her soul and be
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happy in the face of any storm or disapproval. And finally, as a father, he hopes that she will be

betrothed to a man who has forever stay away from detestation and arrogance which is so common

everywhere. Let the house of her husband be comfortable and secure but not at the expense of

anyone. Beyond the superficial concern about the storm, Yates has deeper and more life-long

concerns. He is concerned that she be physically appealing but not so attractive that she thinks of

beauty as her main accomplishment and doesn't strive to develop relationships based on anything

other than appearance. He hopes that she will grow up understanding the importance of being kind

to others, treating all with courtesy and charm. He prays that her spirit will not be choked off by

the hatred of others.

Conclusion

At the conclusion part we can say that the poem portrays how a father, who has been blessed with

a daughter, prays for the future happiness and welfare of her. The poet hopes that instead of

growing up to be a very beautiful woman, his daughter should be blessed with the attributes of a

virtuous and great soul. She should be well-mannered and full of humility rather than being

strongly opinionated, to avoid intellectual detestation because that can drown her in misery. The

ironies that the poet rejected from her beloved Maud Gonne and the paternal standpoint is that

from this rejection he learnt that his daughter would not grow up like Maud Gonne rather she will

share a beautiful mind, glory, love and happiness.

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Recommendation

This paper strongly recommends the readers to read this article W.B. Yeats “A Prayer for my

Daughter”: The ironies of the Paternal Standpoint. It can be said that it will be not a waste of time.

This work will show the reader a great memory of a father the ironies of his life who rejected by

his beloved and then at the middle age his first daughter come where he wishes for his paternal

standpoint that his daughter will grow up with happiness as well as a beautiful mind.
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Reference

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May 2019.

Toker Leona. “W. B. Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter": The Ironies of the Patriarchal Stance.”

Connotations 1 january, 1999, https://www.connotations.de/article/leona-toker-w-b-yeatss-a-

prayer-for-my-daughter-the-ironies-of-the-patriarchal-stance/ .

Mitra Supria, ‘The Soul Recovers Radical Innocence’- W.B.Yeats’ “A Prayer for My Daughter”-

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