A Reading of W.B. Yeats's "A Prayer for my Daughter"
Coming of Age for Old Men and Young Girls
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One Yeats scholar has expressed the poem's initial anxiety as follows:  "How are the innocent, among them his daughter . . . to escape the wrath of coming times?" [John Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats, p.167]  This anxiety continues into the second stanza, but here the poet begins to shift into a new way to conceive of his daughter, and perhaps a way to help shield her from the dangers of life:

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
                                        Imagining in excited reverie          {here is the shift in the poem}
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

When the poet begins, not to fret or fear, but to imagine, then he begins to aid his young child.  For the imagination is the avenue for him to create the world he wants her to live in, the world that he thinks could shelter her, and allow her to come of age with grace, dignity, and honor.  Thus in the next stanza, Yeats begins to express his hopes and wishes for his young girl, which are also Yeats's own prescription for how to live well in the mad world of the 20th century.

continue . . .