A Prayer for My Daughter

“A Prayer for my Daughter” by William Butler (W.B.) Yeats was originally published in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921. This book also includes one of Yeats’s most famous poems—“The Second Coming”—and was Yeats’s eighth collection of lyrical poems. “A Prayer for my daughter” was written in 1919, a year that marked the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. The war lasted until 1921 and heavily influenced Yeats. The poem’s location is Thoor Ballylee (or Ballylee Castle), where Yeats’s poem “The Tower” was also written (though it was published in the 1928 collection of the same name).

“A Prayer for my Daughter” is a modernist work with eight-line stanzas, like the Italian ottava rima form, but the rhyme scheme and metrical structure are variations on the classic. Yeats and Georgie Hyde Lees had a daughter named Anne in 1919 who is the subject of the poem. It explores themes of beauty, innocence, and fatherhood, but can also be read as a political work on Irish Nationalism.

Poet Biography

William Butler Yeats was born on the 13th of June 1865, in Sandymount on the eastern coast of Ireland.