A Prayer for My Daughter is a poem written by William Butler Yeats in 1919. This poem is a pray-like poem. And it generally tells about the poet's ideas about his daughter who is sleeping at the same time while the poem is being told. Throughout the poem the Yeats reflects that how he wants his daughter's future should be. This essay will analyze the poem under three subtitle: 1- What does this poem mean", 2- The poetic devices, imagery, rhyming, figures of speech, used in the poem and mood, diction, language, and the structure of the poem, 3- An essay in a feminist point of view titled "What does the poet want his daughter to become"" .
The poet is watching his infant daughter sleep. In the first stanza he starts with describing the setting of the poem. It is stormy outside, there is a kind of dark and gloomy weather and he prays for her. And he says that he has gloom in his mind and we will understand that what gloom is that in his mind.
In the second stanza the poet describes the things while he was praying for his daughter. He walks for an hour and notices the "sea-wind scream upon the tower", "under the arches of the bridge", "in the elms above the flooded stream." They probably represent the dreaming of the human beings and they are decisive. They are all about the present things and they block people from thinking about the future events. The last four lines of the second stanza clearly explain this idea:
"Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea."
In the third stanza he prays for her beauty, but not too much. He considers the beauty as a decisive element for choosing the right person to marry. He emphasizes that too much beauty may cause her loose the "natural kindness" thus that might prevent her from finding the "heart-revealing intimacy" and a true friend.
Related with the third stanza, the fourth stanza refers to Helen herself, who "being