S18E6: "A Prayer for My Daughter" by William Butler Yeats

Welcome back to Season 18 of the Well Read Poem. During this season, we are offering our listeners six poems about family life. The poems selected for this season are quite various in style and manner, and have been chosen for the light they shed on relationships between parents and children, between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. We hope that these readings will, in their small way, add a measure of comfort and happiness to the lives of our audience during these winter months.

Today's poem is "A Prayer for My Daughter" by William Butler Yeats. Poem reading begins at timestamp 5:25. To learn more about this podcast and host Thomas Banks, visit https://www.theliterary.life/the-well-read-poem/.

A Prayer for My Daughter

by William Butler Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid    Under this cradle-hood and coverlid    My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle    But Gregory's Wood and one bare hill    Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,    Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;    And for an hour I have walked and prayed    Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.   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 That the future years had come    Dancing to a frenzied drum    Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.   May she be granted beauty, and yet not    Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,    Or hers before a looking-glass; for such,    Being made beautiful overmuch,    Consider beauty a sufficient end,    Lose natural kindness, and maybe    The heart-revealing intimacy    That chooses right, and never find a friend.   Helen, being chosen, found life flat and dull,    And later had much trouble from a fool;    While that great Queen that rose out of the spray,    Being fatherless, could have her way,    Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.    It's certain that fine women eat    A crazy salad with their meat    Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.   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.   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.    Oh, may she live like some green laurel    Rooted in one dear perpetual place.   My mind, because the minds that I have loved,    The sort of beauty that I have approved,    Prosper but little, has dried up of late,    Yet knows that to be choked with hate    May well be of all evil chances chief.    If there's no hatred in a mind    Assault and battery of the wind    Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.   An intellectual hatred is the worst,    So let her think opinions are accursed.    Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,    Because of her opinionated mind    Barter that horn and every good    By quiet natures understood    For an old bellows full of angry wind?   Considering that, all hatred driven hence,    The soul recovers radical innocence    And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,    And that its own sweet will is heaven's will,    She can, though every face should scowl    And every windy quarter howl    Or every bellows burst, be happy still.   And may her bridegroom bring her to a house    Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;    For arrogance and hatred are the wares    Peddled in the thoroughfares.    How but in custom and in ceremony    Are innocence and beauty born?    Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,    And custom for the spreading laurel tree.