"A Prayer For My Daughter" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats. Written in 1919, just a few days after the birth of Yeats's daughter Anne, the poem consists of ten octets, or eight-line stanzas. Over the course of these ten stanzas, the speaker watches his daughter sleep while observing a storm outside. Spurred to dread and reflection by the weather, he delivers a monologue urging his daughter to choose stability, tradition, integrity, and internal fulfillment over superficial beauty, hatred, and opinionatedness. Delivered in a dramatic and urgent tone, the poem employs the symbolic image of a laurel tree and a "horn of plenty" to exemplify this hoped-for future. It also makes use of classical and mythological allusions in order to convey its points. The work uses an unusual AABBCDDC rhyme scheme as well as a loose iambic pentameter meter.
This is among the more autobiographical and confessional of Yeats's poems. It references not only the birth of his daughter, but also his repeated romantic rejections from the actress Maud Gonne and her own daughter Iseult, as well as his temporary home at Thoor Ballylee in Ireland's County Galway. It can be viewed as a companion to his later poem "A Prayer for My Son." The daughter addressed in the poem would grow up to be an artist in her own right, working both on set and costume design for the Irish theater and as a painter.
