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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. It might well be. For the weather has been rough.
The poet is William Butler Yeats, and the storm he fears is not one that a high pressure system can lift and blow away. Europe has been ravaged by a terrible war, and it is January, hardly two months since the armistice. War likewise is brewing in Ireland, because the Irish are demanding their independence from England. Yeats is an Irish patriot, and he wants that independence too, but the poet and sage in him knows that blood calls for blood, and beyond Ireland, forces are massing that threaten the very fabric of a decent and human existence. In another poem, “The Second Coming,” he expresses his fear that some “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” having waited two thousand years, “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” This storm, bred on the Atlantic, appears to come not from the ancient world, and not even from the recent enemies in central and eastern Europe, but from some leveling western force, something to flatten all distinctions and hierarchies, and to swallow all things up in its restless political agitation.
A century before, the poet Shelley, in his “Ode to the West Wind,” was writing not about the Gulf Stream washing up on the shores of England and bringing its annual warmth, but about a new way of life coming from the west, a life of freedom. Those were heady days, and I think we can pardon a little bit of paradise-dreaming, though what America really needed, and got, was that mingling of much praise, some blame, and a great deal of sober analysis that she got from Alexis de Tocqueville, still and by far the shrewdest observer of American ways. But in 1919, that kind of breathless belief in a new age a-dawning wore thin. Shelley wrote once about loving two women at the same time, one of whom was his wife. Yeats did not do that.
The modern reader might find Yeats’ prayer a bit startling, because he seems to wish for his daughter a protected and enclosed existence, apart from the shouting and the unreason of political action, but if we think more carefully about what makes us most human, and about when we are happiest, it is not when we are storming or protesting or marching; and there may be nothing sadder and more ugly than a human being, his or her face contorted in wrath, thrusting a slogan-ridden sign into the eye of the camera, and crying out what thousands of others cry, as the very personality is absorbed into the passions of a mob. And indeed, if political action is to be valued, it is only so that men can establish a reasonable system of laws so that the real work of a human life and a human civilization can go on – the work, or rather the play, that Yeats wishes for his daughter here, the play of love, and friendship, and the graces and courtesy of a gentle life centered in the home. Don’t sell our Irish poet short. By the time he was fifty-four years old, as he was when he wrote this poem, he had seen far more than most of us will ever see, of the glory and the shame of man – and of woman too.
Not in the “thoroughfares,” then, but in custom and ceremony, says the poet, are innocence and beauty born. That is where we find our plenty in this world, and the spreading laurel tree, sacred to poets and singers, and ever green.
At Word and Song, we’re grateful for beauty and wisdom wherever we find them, and they are here in this poem.
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind. I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. Helen being chosen found life flat and dull And later had much trouble from a fool, While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray, Being fatherless could have her way Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man. It’s certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone. In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned By those that are not entirely beautiful; Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty's very self, has charm made wise, And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved, From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes. May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound, Nor but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. O may she live like some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place. My mind, because the minds that I have loved, The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there’s no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf. An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind? Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still. And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
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Prayer for My Daughter