Summary
The speaker starts by describing the storm that rages outside while he watches his daughter sleep in her cradle, beneath her blanket. The only barriers to the wind outside, surging in from the Atlantic Ocean, are a hill and a woodland, which the speaker refers to as "Gregory's Wood." He has spent the past hour pacing and praying in a melancholy mood, listening to the screaming of wind among the towers, trees, and bridges. In a trancelike daydream, he imagines that the future is emerging from the sea, which is both innocent and murderous.
The speaker hopes that his daughter will be beautiful, but not too beautiful, because excessive beauty can both cause distress to others and cause certain problems for the beautiful person herself. Those who are very beautiful can come to view beauty as sufficient in and of itself, and they therefore feel no need to be kind or to develop intimacy with others. He uses a series of comparisons to explain the danger of too much beauty. Helen of Troy, for instance, found life uninteresting and was annoyed by foolish men, as a result of her extraordinary beauty. Venus, who had no father because she was born out of the ocean, was at liberty to choose any man—and yet she chose the unimpressively bow-legged blacksmith Hephaestus. Women have a tendency to act strangely when they are beautiful, which only cancels out the potential benefits of beauty (referred to here as the "Horn of Plenty").
Analysis
Much of "A Prayer for My Daughter" consists of broadly applicable advice, and the speaker draws on what he seems to view as universal truths about concepts such as beauty and love. This makes the specificity of its opening stanzas all the more important. The opening of the poem establishes the speaker and his daughter as individuals with particular, distinctive characteristics. The description of the storm with which the poem begins does not merely establish that the speaker is bringing his daughter into a stormy, challenging world on a metaphorical level: it also gives Yeats an opportunity to sketch out the speaker's landscape, lending this family individual identity. References to the Atlantic Ocean and, with even more geographical specificity, to "Gregory's Wood" (likely an allusion to the lands owned by Yeats's friend Lady Gregory), ground the poem in place. This makes the "reverie" that the speaker launches into feel more potent. For all that it comes from his imagination, and for all that it addresses broad universals with allusions culled from classical texts, it is firmly set in a concrete time, place, and atmosphere. Furthermore, Yeats works to make the reader feel intimate with that setting—an important task, given that the reader is about to be privy to the speaker's private thoughts and fixations. The poem opens with the phrase "once more," which indicates a certain shared familiarity between the speaker and the reader: both are encountering an apparently ongoing situation, prompting the reader to feel initiated into a preexisting life.
As the poem shifts from scene-setting to the speaker's expression of hopes for his daughter's future, a somewhat surprising throughline emerges. The speaker does not wish for his daughter to become remarkable like Helen of Troy or Venus, but rather for her to be generally ordinary—similar to, rather than different from, the people around her. The first way in which he addresses this idea is through the concept of beauty. The speaker believes that beauty is extremely consequential, and, for this reason, that it can be genuinely dangerous to those who possess it as well as to the people around them. Instead, the speaker advocates for a measured existence, in which beauty exists only to such a degree that it does not crowd out other important characteristics: kindness, openness, and judgment of character. The extreme nature of the threatening storm outside is subtly juxtaposed here with the speaker's hope that his daughter will grow up to be balanced rather than extreme. Meanwhile, the juxtaposition of two food-based metaphors—a "crazy salad" beside the prosaic "meat"—suggests that beauty offers variety and excitement, but does not provide the necessary everyday nourishment important for all people.
