Speaker
The speaker is a father preoccupied with fears and hopes for his baby daughter's future. In the hopes and fears that he expresses, it becomes possible to discern his opinions and values more broadly. He wishes for his daughter to be deeply loved and to experience loving relationships. He is fascinated by beauty but mistrustful of it, partly because he believes that it can be disruptive to precisely these loving relationships. He believes that a person's internal, emotional life has far-reaching consequences for their happiness, and above all that internally felt hatred can corrupt both a person's happiness and their ability to form happy connections with others. Finally, he is of the opinion that tradition and groundedness are essential to future happiness. While Yeats himself had a daughter, and it is possible to read this speaker as an autobiographical representation of the author, the poem does not contain any explicit reference to Yeats's life.
The Daughter
Because the speaker's daughter is both very young and asleep as he narrates, the speaker never experiences or encounters her directly. Instead, she is filtered through her father's imagination and impressions. Moreover, because he is discussing her hoped-for or feared future, rather than her current reality, the image of the daughter as evoked by the speaker is less a reflection of her as she is, and more a cluster of impressions about womanhood and adulthood as a state of being.
