A Prayer for My Daughter

“A Prayer for my Daughter” has 10 stanzas: each stanza has eight lines (written in iambic pentameter or iambic tetrameter) and follows a loose rhyme scheme of AABBCDDC. The form could be considered a variation on ottava rima.

Yeats is a modernist and symbolist poet. The images he uses function as symbols and has multiple interpretations. On the surface, this poem is a father talking about what he wishes for his daughter, and was written shortly after the birth of Yeats’s daughter, Anne. A deeper interpretation is that the daughter is a symbol of Ireland as an independent nation, as Yeats’sdaughter was born the year the Irish War of Independence began, and Yeats was notable for his political beliefs.

In the first stanza, the first-person speaker of the poem—presumably Yeats—describes a storm that rages as his daughter sleeps. The storm can be read as both a natural phenomenon and a symbol for the Irish-English conflict. In the latter reading, the newborn daughter is a symbol for a new, free Ireland. The storm could also represent more universal trials that a father imagines a child might endure throughout their life. What stands between the ocean and the child’s home is minimal, so the storm causes the speaker to reflect and pray, while walking for an hour.