Beauty
The speaker of this poem has complex ideas about beauty and about the impact beauty can have on both those who possess it and those who encounter it. He hopes that his daughter has some degree of beauty, but fears the effects of too much beauty in a woman. An overabundance of beauty can cause other aspects of personhood to atrophy, as far as he is concerned, reducing the beautiful person's capacity for kindness or connection. Beautiful women can both cause great unhappiness to the men around them, and can choose undeserving men, the speaker says. He hints that he himself has fallen for, and been left bereft by, extraordinary beauty. Instead, the speaker hopes that his daughter's beauty is one that is tied to and grows out of other virtues—generosity, kindness, learnedness, and tradition—instead of one that supplants these virtues.
Tradition
The speaker ends his prayer by expressing a hope that his daughter's home, when she is older and married, is oriented around ceremony and custom. Through the exercise of routine and tradition, he believes, she will come to possess true happiness and beauty. A sense of permanence and place—expressed through the metaphor of a laurel tree rooted in a single location—can lead to a more interesting, fulfilling, useful life. This particular hope is inextricable from expectations of femininity, not only because the speaker imagines his daughter's future as dependent upon marriage, but also because he expresses a distrust of the "thoroughfares" outside, and pins his hopes of tradition-driven life on a public space. In this way, the work suggests that his daughter's future will be, or should be, a domestic one rather than one that engages with the unpredictability of the outside world.
Parent-Child Relationships
The poem's speaker is entirely devoted to his daughter, driven to both real distress and real excitement by imagining her future. The fact that he thinks about his child so intensely while she sleeps, unaware of the storm outside and of her father's thoughts, suggests a fundamental asymmetry in the relationship between parent and child: the parent bears the burden of fear for the child's future, while the child experiences no such fear. At the same time, the speaker does heap his own expectations and preconceptions upon the child, creating a certain burden for her as well. His ideas and experiences regarding beauty, tradition, love, and relationships are projected onto a child too young to understand the contents of his prayer. Indeed, the speaker's expectations for his daughter are highly dependent upon her gender, and upon his ideas about the role of women in the world: even as he lovingly prays for his child he also passes down to her the restrictions of traditional femininity.
