A Reading of W.B. Yeats's "A Prayer for my Daughter"
Coming of Age for Old Men and Young Girls
--page 8--

John Unterecker sees these concluding images as the essence of Yeats's hope in the poem, and his method:  "Yeats focuses his poem on two images:  the rich Horn of Plenty which he associates with courtesy, aristocracy, and ceremony; and the hidden laurel tree which, 'rooted in one dear perpetual palce,' can provide through custom a 'radical' (rooted) innocence for the soul" (A Reader's Guide, 167).  Indeed, these twin images, of plentitude housed within a place of safety and repose, suggest the response to the powerful anxiety that opens the poem, an anxiety about how to house the innocents of the world from the storm raging outside.

Yeats was often a poet of the abyss, a poet of horror.  He himself recognized the reality of "the growing murderousness of the world" (from his The Trembling of the Veil), and in such poems as "The Second Coming" he gives a grim sense of the imminent apocalypse:

Turning and turning in the widening grye
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

This powerful poem of despair and anxiety was composed and published during the same year as "A Prayer for my Daughter," and the very things in "Prayer" that support the world are precisely the things in "Second Coming" that are threatened:  "the ceremony of innocence."  But Yeats balances his apocalyptic vision with a vision of survival, a survival that is prompted by a father's most powerful emotion:  concern for his child.  In his prayer--and I believe it is truly more prayer than poem--Yeats utters his plea not just for his daughter, but for all those who seek to shelter innocence in a world of destruction.