Thus the next stanza describes the quality that Yeats came to see as at the very heart of civilized life: courtesy. By courtesy Yeats understood a means of being in the world that would preserve the best of human dignity, art, and emotion, without giving in to the tempests of passion and destruction that were ravaging the world during the very time he was writing this poem. Such is his prayer for his daughter: that she learn to survive with grace and dignity in a world turned horrific:
In courtesy I'd have her chiefly
learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift
but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely
beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the
fool
For beauty's very self, has
charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has
roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot
take his eyes.
Love, Yeats suggests, comes not to the "entirely beautiful," but to those who can "charm" with "a glad kindness." This informs the stanza that follows, in which Yeats asks for his daughter to flourish, but in hiding, and to be merry, but to contain her merriment within a particular place:
May she become a flourishing
hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like
the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing
round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a
chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green
laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual
place.