A Prayer for My Daughter

Yeats advocates for a particular kind of beauty throughout the poem; this theme reflects patriarchal expectations of women as well as Yeats’spersonalexperiences with women. Excessive beauty is to be avoided: “beauty and yet not” (Line17)—or a moderate amount of beauty—will forge sustainable love and domestic happiness.

Excessive beauty is described through the lens of Greek mythology; specifically, Yeats centers on Helen of Troy and Aphrodite. These women possess bounteous good looks, described using the mythological Horn of Plenty: a horn that belonged to Amalthea—a goat that nursed Zeus—that broke off and was filled with fruits for him. When Helen’sgood looks made Paris into a troublesome “fool” (Line 26)—or rather, fueled the Trojan War—the horn is “undone” (Line32): a curse rather than a divine trait. To be beautiful like Aphrodite is to invite “trouble” (Line26), so Yeats prays his daughter is not too beautiful.

Moderate beauty is defined by attitude more than looks: Yeats prays that his daughter is happy to entertain, but otherwise has a quiet demeanor. These qualities can be found in the Cult of True Womanhood, or the Culture of Domesticity. Nineteenth century etiquette and advice books—as well as women’s magazines—included instructions for housewives that included bringing “merriment” (Lines 45-46), as Yeats refers to it, to the lives of their husbands, children, and communities, but not to have, as Yeats puts it, an “opinionated mind” (Line61).

Excessive and moderate beauties in Yeats’slife are, respectively, Maud Gonne (his long-time muse) and his wife, Georgie.Gonne—an actress, activist, and occultist—was quite physically attractive and “opinionated” (Line 61); after turning down Yeats’smultiplemarriage proposals, she married Major John MacBride. Yeats was notoriously upset about this marriage andGonne’sinvolvement with MacBride’s radical politics, including EasterRising. He frequently used Helen of Troy in his poetry to refer toGonne. Eventually, Yeats married Georgie and became more politically conservative, hoping for Irish independence through less violent means than the radical faction was willing to use.

At the end of the poem, beauty is defined, or “born” (Line78), in “ceremony” (Line79). Yeats expands on this definition, clarifying that ceremony is the “rich horn,” or the aforementioned Horn of Plenty. Beauty, in these terms, needs to be balanced with innocence to be moderate.