Prayer for My Daughter

William Butler Yeats, 1919

The poet is awake late at night in a tower overlooking the sea, as a storm rages outside.  It seems that nothing stands as a windbreak between him and that storm.  It’s not that he fears for himself, but his little child, a baby girl, lies in her cradle.  And, he says, a great gloom is in his mind.
     The poet is William Butler Yeats, and the stor…