The speaker of this poem—and the daughter he prays for—are scarcely described in any way that might allow readers to identify them individually. The father's prayer for his daughter is largely nonspecific, containing general advice directed towards women. For readers familiar with Yeats, less generic areas of concern can be detected. For instance, it is possible to understand the poem as referring in various places to the Irish struggle for independence at the start of the twentieth century, or to understand the speaker's reference to past heartbreak as a nod to Yeats's tormented relationship with the activist and actress Maud Gonne. But the story and name of the daughter at the poem's center are left ambiguous. Here, however, we will discuss W.B. Yeats's daughter Anne, as well as the relationship between this poem and Anne Yeats.
W.B. Yeats wrote "A Prayer for my Daughter" in 1919, a mere two days after the birth of his daughter Anne. At this time, Yeats and his daughter were staying at Thoor Ballylee, a tower owned by Yeats's friend Lady Augusta Gregory. Moreover, Anne was born in the midst of the Anglo-Irish war, lending a tumultuous background to the moment—one evoked indirectly through the image of a storm at the beginning of this poem. Anne was the child of Yeats and Georgiana Lee-Hydes, whom Yeats married in 1917. The couple's marriage lasted throughout their lives, but it was preceded by Yeats's years-long, chaotic affair with Maud Gonne. Gonne rejected Yeats's proposals on multiple occasions. Shortly before he married Lee-Hydes, Yeats proposed marriage to Gonne's daughter Iseult—who also rejected his offer. This recent experience of romantic rejection makes its appearance in the poem through elliptical references—for instance, the speaker's description of his own difficulty in the face of beautiful women.
The speaker of this work urges his daughter to live moderately and safely, according to the strictures of traditional femininity. However, Anne Yeats had an artistic career of her own, both independent from her father's and inextricable from her family background. Raised at Thoor Ballylee, where the poem takes place, and then in Dublin, she was sent to study art at Dublin's Royal Hibernian Academy when she was thirteen. She was also trained in brush painting by her aunt (W.B. Yeats's sister), Elizabeth. Subsequently, she worked not only in painting—the medium for which she remains best-known—but also in theater design. In 1936, Anne Yeats began working as a set and costume designer at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The theater was itself founded in part by her father, who also wrote plays produced there: it was one of the major institutions by which Ireland's artistic community in the period advanced the goal of building a national literary and cultural canon. In fact, while employed by the theater, Yeats produced costumes and sets for several revivals of her father's own plays. Even after leaving the Abbey Theatre, she continued to work in stage design at a variety of Dublin theatrical companies.
During the 1940s, however, Anne Yeats transitioned from working primarily in set and costume design to working primarily in painting. She trained in this new medium in both Dublin and Paris, and was both featured in and active in the administration of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art—an event aimed at promoting and displaying modern Irish art in the twentieth century. Her expressionist paintings often focused on scenes of the domestic and the quotidian, with touches of the otherworldly. Furthermore, Yeats illustrated a number of books as her painting career continued, including for several well-known writers such as poet Louis MacNeice. Yeats also experimented with lithography, continuing to explore new artistic mediums.
Though she died in 2001, Yeats continued to show her work both in Ireland and internationally throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin 1995 dedicated a retrospective to her in 1995, and following her death, the National Gallery of Ireland held a memorial exhibition of her work. Her paintings also continue to be sold to buyers at auction. To this day, Anne Yeats's legacy is a doubled one. It contains her own life and work, and at the same time encompasses the depiction of her conjured in her father's poetry. However, even as far as her father's own legacy goes, Anne Yeats was not merely a character in W.B. Yeats's poetic imagination: she was his collaborator, helping bring his plays vividly to the Irish stage in the early phases of her career.
