Autobiographical Elements in "A Prayer for My Daughter" by W.B. Yeats

"A Prayer for My Daughter" is a deeply personal and autobiographical poem written by W.B. Yeats in 1919, shortly after the birth of his daughter Anne. The poem reflects Yeats' deep love for his daughter, as well as his concerns for her future in a world that he saw as being filled with turmoil and conflict.

The poem is deeply autobiographical, drawing heavily from Yeats' own experiences and beliefs. He reflects on the chaotic political climate of the time and his own desire for peace and stability for his daughter. Yeats was a prominent figure in Irish politics and was heavily involved in the fight for Irish independence. He lived through a time of great upheaval and change, and this is reflected in his prayer for his daughter's future. He expresses his fear of the negative influences that he believes threaten to corrupt the innocence of his daughter, and prays for her to be protected from these influences.

In the poem, Yeats also reflects on his own artistic pursuits and the legacy he hopes to leave for his daughter. He was a celebrated poet and playwright, and his love of art and literature is evident in the poem. He prays that his daughter will be blessed with the same creative spirit and love of beauty that he himself possesses. He also hopes that she will be able to find joy and solace in art and literature, just as he did.

The poem also reflects Yeats' belief in the power of imagination and the role it plays in shaping reality. He prays that his daughter will be blessed with the ability to see beyond the surface of things and to perceive the deeper truths of the world. He encourages her to use her imagination to create a better future for herself and for those around her.

Another autobiographical element of the poem is Yeats’ deep-seated spiritual beliefs, he prays that his daughter will be guided by a strong sense of spiritual purpose and that she will be able to find her place in the world. He prays that she will be guided by a sense of morality and that she will be able to make a positive impact on the world.

In addition to these personal and autobiographical elements, the poem also reflects Yeats’ love of Ireland and its culture. He prays that his daughter will be able to appreciate and understand the beauty of Ireland and its people. He hopes that she will be able to find a deep sense of connection to her homeland and that she will be able to contribute to its continued growth and development.

In conclusion, "A Prayer for My Daughter" is a deeply personal and moving poem that reflects the hopes, fears, and aspirations of the poet for his daughter and the world she will grow up in. Yeats' own experiences and beliefs are woven throughout the poem, making it an autobiographical work that is both deeply personal and universal in its themes. It is a powerful reminder of the love and sacrifice that parents make for their children, and the hope that we all have for the future of our children and the world they will inherit. 

Md. Rajibul Hasan

Lecturer in English

Govt. HSS College, Magura. 

Auden is a modern poet or Modernism in Auden

Both thematically and structurally, Auden’s poems show the very essence of modernism. The characteristics that are needed to consider him as a modern poet are all in profusely blended in his poems. In the following passages, I have tried to demonstrate the elements of modernism both thematically and structurally to prove him as a modern poet.

Formal/Stylistic characteristics:

Symbolism and Imagery:

In terms of Formal/Stylistic characteristics, Auden is also a modern poet. He uses in his poetry a wide range of Imagery, symbolism and other figures of speech. He adopted the style of symbolism in order to represent his experience in the modern world.

In Petition, he represents the old, decaying and rotten Western civilization as the house of the deads. Praying to God, he writes:

 

“Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at

New style of architecture, a change of heart.”

 

Auden’s landscape imagery is, also modern. In the poem entitled In Memory of W.B.Yeats, he represents the atmosphere of the then Europe as follows:

 

“In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequence in his hate.”

 

 

Metre and Versification:

 

The most peculiar quality of the modern poetry is the poet’s tendency is to experiment with different kinds of metre and versification. Auden is also modern in this respect. He has experimented with free verse, blank verse, the ballad metre etc. In this connection Lawrence Durrell Observes:

 

“He tried his hand at everything, from jazz lyrics in two-four time, to free verse; and all his production are stamped with authority and feeling of mastery over his medium.”  (Durrell, 1952)

 

Thematic Characteristics:

 

War and violence:

Auden’s social concerns are mostly expressed in the context of war. Auden is an avid observer of war. He surveys different social, political, and economic upheavals caused by World Wars. He argues that most of the ills of the contemporary society results from war., Modern age is marked by violence and war. Auden says that war and violence had always been in the primitive age but they were not as brutal as the modern savages. In “The Shield of Achilles”, he says,

“Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles

Who would not live long.”

 

In “In Memory of W. B Yeats”, he refers that all Europe is in the grip of the terror of war and the bloodthirsty leaders of Europe are threatening each other. Nations live in isolation in constant dread of each other,

“In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequence in his hate.”

 

Auden is here indicating that all the European nations are crying for war, like the dogs barking loudly. There is no fellow-feeling among the European nations. Rather they are separated from each other by their hatred.

 

Mendelson writes in an essay entitled “Auden’s Revision of Modernism” that the poet “welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time”

 

Barrenness:

 

Auden shows the barrenness of modern age as well as the modern human soul.  Auden refers that Modern age is totally barren without any feature

 

"A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

“No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood”

Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down."

 

Auden’s description of modern souls also likens the waste land of Eliot. Human souls are infertile and incapable of love. Forster in “A Passage to India”, says,

 

“Everything exists, nothing has value.”

 

 

Auden portrays that modern soul are hollow. Their mind are unable to communicate their emotions and their heart are like "the desert” where the

 

“the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye’’

 

Human Suffering and Lack of Morality: Auden portray in his poems modern people’s lack of morality. In Musée des Beaux Arts Auden presents the philosophical truth about human suffering.. Moreover, people generally remain indifferent to the pain and suffering of an individual. While a man suffers, others are engaged in their usual labour In Musee Des Beaux Arts; the poet upholds the lack of morality through the mythical incident of Icarus Here he shows that in the human suffering. “Human is indifferent”. The painting painted by Brueghels shows that while some people of the worlds suffer, others are busy doing their work. The pains are generally so much absorbed in their lives that they remain unconcerned rather people eat, drink and enjoy and the children enjoy and play without any concern. This human condition leads our poet to the worlds of suffering. Auden says,

 

“While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

…

There always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen”

 

Icarus had the intention to fly to the sun. In order to put his ambition into practice, he tries to reach the sun with the help of artificial wings made of feather and wax. But after flying a little distance, his wings melted and he fell down head-long into the sea,

 

”the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,’’

 

And the expensive delicate ship must have seen,

 

“Something amazing, a boy fallen out of the sky

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

 

But no one comes to rescue and pays no attention rather all become busy with their own tasks. Actually this is the highlighted mentality of the modern man which is diagnosised in Auden’s poetry

 

“how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster;”

 

Auden portrays that modern people have lost their love or sympathy towards other. Even when a man dies, they do not care about it but continues their daily life style.

 

Richard Hoggart says, “Auden combines an intense interest in the human heart with a desire to reform society and he thinks over psychological ills greater than our political”

The above mentioned passages indicate that Auden in a true modern poet expressing the very ideals of modernity through his poems. Both thematically and structurally, his poems are landmark in modernism.

 

References:

01.   Richard Hoggart, (1951), Auden: An Introductory Essay. Retrieved from books.google.com

02.  Mendelson, Retrieved from www.pabooks.libraries.psu.edu

03.  Lawrence Durrell (1952), A Key to Modern British Poetry, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Allusions in T.S Eliot's The Wasteland

 

Eliot in his poem, “The Wasteland “, uses many allusions from different sources. His uses of quotation from a large number of European writers give profundity and intensity to his poetry. The myriad sources of allusions from literature, the Bible and myth effectively mirror the thematic aspect of the poem such as the confusion and decay of modern civilization.

The epigraph of the Wasteland is from Satyrican. It means ‘’I want to die’’. The boring mechanical routine, sex perversity and commercial instinct of the modern man are responsive for what the psychologists call the death wish.

In the Wasteland there are several allusions to Dante’s Divine Comedy, including specific references to the canto iii of Inferno. For example, the first of these allusions occurs in the opening section of the poem, entitled, “The Burial of the Dead”.  He says,

“Unreal city

. . .

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many

I had not thought death had undone so many”

 

The crowds moving over London Bridge are the spiritually dead citizens of the Wasteland going their daily routine. They reminds us of the similar crowd in Dante’s Inferno where Dante says,

“I should never have believed death had undone so many”

The phrase   Unreal city is borrowed from Charles Baudelaire’s poem entitled ‘Les septs veillards’. Baudelaire Calls Paris the unreal city and Eliot calls London the unreal city.

 

Another line from the Burial of the Dead, ‘’ sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled ‘’- comes from canto iv of the Inferno in which Dante encounters the pagan souls of Limbo who ‘’did not have baptimism”. In this canto, Dante says-

 

‘’Here, there was to be heard no sound of lamentation, only sighs which disturb the eternal air’’the sighs refers to the sounds made by the pagan who could not have entered into God’s grace anyway.

 Eliot’s use of allusion to canto IV and earlier allusion to canto iii show that in the waste land, he is trying to draw attention to two particular kinds of sinners depicted in Dante’s Inferno. Eliot’s London crowds are ambivalent, like the sinners of canto iii and live in longing like those of canto IV.

Eliot regards April is the cruelest month because the new sweet shower of April offer no glad welcome to them. Here he contrasts to the description of the spring as reflected in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canter bury Tales:

“When that April with its sweet shower

…

And made it burgeon forth in flower”

 

Though April is the happy month but for the modern waste lands April appears as the cruelest month because they are spiritually dead.

 

 

A Game of Chess

 

The title of the section "A Game of Chess" is taken from the play "Women Beware Women" by Thomas Middleton. While the duke is seducing a girl in the gallery in view of the audience, his confederate is distracting her mother in law's attention with a game of chess. Here the game of chess is symbol of fruitless activity and an occasion from some excitement to relieve the monotony of modern life. The lines  :‘’the chair she sat in, like a burnished throne/An empty, rich woman is sitting at her dressing table.” Is the reference to Antony and Cleopatra, in which Enobarbus describe Cleopatra at her first meeting with Anthony:

“The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

…

The winds were love-sick with them

The allusion to Antony and Cleopatra contrasts voluptuous femininity and romantic love, and the artificial and sterile personal relationships in the waste land..

 

At the last portion of this section: "Good night, Ladies, good night, sweet / ladies, good night, good night."- has been quoted from the speech of Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Ophelia imagines that she has been deserted by Hamlet and goes mad as she loaves the royal room. These are the last words of mad Ophelia before her death by drowing. It suggests that poor Lil is so much frustrated that she is also on the verge of death.

 

The Fire Sermon

 

The title of The Fire Sermon is taken from the famous sermon of Buddha, popularly known as the fire sermon. The allusion Buddha's Fire sermon has a close reference to the fire lust with which the modern world is burning

 

 

"But at my back, in a cold blast I hear /The rattled of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear" is an ironic contrast to the lines of Andrew Marvell in his poem, To His Coy Mistress:

 

"But at my back I always hear

Times winged chariot hurrying near."

 

Marvell heard the sound of time's fleeting riding on his winged chariot behind him. But in "The Waste Land", Tiresias seems to hear the noise of the Londoners ratting about like dry bones.

 

"The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs porter in the Spring."

 

Another line -

"When lovely woman stoops to folly” means, when lovely woman allows herself to be reduced. The line is taken from Olivia's song in Oliver Goldsmith's novel "The Vicar of Wakefield".

 

"When a lovely woman stoops to folly

. . .

 

To hide her shame from every eye

. . . is to die.’’

 

In these lines exposes Olivia’s pathetic situation. She felt terribly guilty and repentant and wanted to die. In contrast to Olivia the modern girl does not mind the loss of her chastity rather she ‘’paces about her room’’

 

Decay and Remedy in W.B Yeats' Poems or W.B Yeats is a Modern Poet

William Butler Yeats is one of the modern poets who is acutely conscious of modern civilization with its manifolds problems. Yeats vividly portrays in his poems the picture of disorder, despairing individual behaviors. He has seen a sense of uncertainty, insecurity with the loss of faith in Christianity. Also he perceives the decay of European society after the First World War. Besides, he has also provided some remedies to cope with these problems but the solutions suggested by him are not practical, but ideal and impossible.

 

The very opening lines of the poem "The Second Coming" neatly and effectively stop us with the situation of the world after the First World War. He wrote many poems dealing with the crumbling of modern civilization due of war. In the Second Coming, he describes what lies at the malady:

 

 

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer,

Things fall apart; the centre can't hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"

 

Yeats mind is equally stuffed with the anarchy and the blood -dimmed tide of the modern world:

 

"The blood - dimmed thee is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all convictions, while the word

Are full of passionate intensity."

 

These lines indicate the decadence and disorder that prevailed after the First World War. The poet gives us a picture of the disintegration which has overtaken the Christian civilization. The diminishing force of Christianity is conveyed to us through the idea that Christianity is like a falcon that has lost touch with the falconer and has thus become directionless. The poet says that the centre of things is unable to hold itself together and as a result complete anarchy is let loose upon the world and this anarchy is bringing with it a lot of blood shed. The worst part of the whole situation is that the best people are not sure of themselves whereas the worst parts are sure of themselves. An atmosphere of fascination and violence has overtaken everything.

 

Yeats portrays that though war has been ended, its effects are continuously affecting the people of modern age. He says that there remains insecurity and disorder everywhere. Yeats feels gloomy and fears of a stormy future. He knows that the world is full of disorder and there "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

 

This threatening background is the cause for the poet's gloom. Being conscious of this chaotic world, the poet wants to save his daughter from many of the evils. Hence, the poet is naturally gloomy, and the poem opens with the image of his child sleeping innocently through a howling storm, and the poet wishes and prays for the safety, protection and the best settlement in life for her. The problem before him is how to protect his daughter from the wrath of the coming cruel tides of time which would bring a ruin upon civilization:

 

"Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea."

 

There is a great gloom in the poet’s mind and an excited reverie caused by the sad aftermath of the first world war. Dr. B. Rajan pertinently remarks, "yeats's prayer for his daughter gains in strength against the threatening background which makes the appeal to custom and ceremony."

 

Arnold Usher in ‘’ Three Irishman’’ says that in the poem, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Yeats has focused some remedy of the decay of this modern age. He says ‘’mere anarchy’’ can’t harm the child if she is innocent and is in custom and ceremony breed’’.

 

In the poem, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” he wishes his daughter may find an aristocratic husband in order to be safe. He regards aristocracy as the guardian of the traditional culture and way of life and of the highest spiritual values.

 

The poet's fear is the safety of his daughter and his main indication is that the arrogance and hatred of common people revolves from their negligence of traditional and moral values. So, Yeats has given some solutions to cope with these manifold problems that are- traditional and moral values should be maintained instead of arrogance.

 

In the poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”, the poet is dissatisfied and frustrated with the country in which he has been living. He sees that modern people do not consider the genuineness of the old people but only cares for sexual pleasures. The young man and woman are in close embrace –

 

-"The young

In one another's arms"

 

They can spare no thought for those masterpiece of art which are the product of ageless intellect:

 

"Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect."

 

Yeats refers his age as the world of chivalrous, gallant, adventurous young men. This is the 20th century world of spider women who attract men into their fold. It is the world where only the young can enjoy honey of the sweet Eves; old men are shut out from it. But in his age, Yeats portrays that values have changed. Older people are neglected "That no country for old men."

 

As it is stated earlier that Yeats gives solutions that are ideal and impractical, he tries to solve the problem of how one should cope with old age. His solution here is that an old man should escape to Byzantium which is the world of art and spirituality as distinguished from the world of sensuality.

 

His desire for Byzantium was the antidote for the ‘’dissipation and despairs’’ that he found in the modern world. The escape to Byzantium means not only an escape from sensuality and morality but also from impurity, ugliness and corruption. The solution suggested by Yeats in this poem is not practical, but ideal and impossible.

 

Parkinson asserts that “‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is revealing, for the poem resolves the problem of old age and art.” (Thomas Francis Parkinson, 1971, p.56)

 

To conclude, it can be said that Yeats, in many of his poems, vividly portrays the various problems of the then society and gives ideal solutions to those problems.

 

References:

 

01.  Balachandra Rajan, (1969), W.B. Yeats: a critical introduction, Hutchinson: Hutchinson university library.

02.  Thomas Francis Parkinson, (1971), W. B. Yeats: the later poetry, California: University of California Press.

 

 

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William Butler Yeats is a Modern Poet

The following essay is on Yeats as a modern poet. I have tried my best to illustrate how Yeats can be referred as a true Modern Poet. In form and content, W.B Yeats is a true example of an Modern Poet. Have a look how I have proceeded. 

 Picture Source: Wikipedia

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is regarded as not only the most important Irish poet, but also as one of the most important poets of Modern age. His poems have been seen as the examples of modern literature. In his poems, we find astounding variety, political note, realism, religion, mysticism and so on. And all these matters have made him a true modern poet. However, his greatest period is generally said to have begun with the publication of The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919, and by the end of his career he was ranked along with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, as a foremost modernist poet. (Intro by Ian Mackean)

Like many of the canonical Modernist writers, the work of W.B. Yeats represents the paradox of a longing for the past and a vision for the future, (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991; Cantor, 1988). Whether it be the revision of America's political past, in the form of Ezra Pound's "John Adams Cantos" (Pound, 1986) or T.S. Eliot's revisiting of a Christian theological past in the form of his Ariel poems (Eliot, 1989) Modernism constantly sought to find a future from the traditional past, as Hugh Kenner says of Eliot: "these poems exhaust tradition, or as much of the tradition as lay within the compass of their author's purpose." (Kenner, 1969: 210)

Politics and contemporary life are also the concerned matters for modernist poets. And Irish politics was a theme to which Yeats frequently returned, particularly in the middle phase of his career, but he was responding as an individual to the turmoil and violence which was on the one hand tearing his country apart, and on the other hand setting it free. In his poem ‘Easter 1916’ his concern is to commemorate the individuals who suffered and died in the struggle to bring about what he calls 'A terrible beauty', and in his Nobel lecture he drew attention to the 'monstrous savagery' perpetrated on both sides of the conflict.

As Malcolm Bradbury assert in his Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (Bradbury ad McFarlane, 1991), Modernism has always represented the symbiosis of aesthetic and socio-political ideals: "One of the word's (Modernism) associations is with the coming of a new era if high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationism, in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life." (Bradbury, 1991: 25)

In the early work of Yeats this took the form of a deliberate evocation of Irish mythology. In such poems as "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland" (Yeats, 1987: 90) and those in the volume The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1987: 99-109), the poet evokes an Ireland unified by a shared past, a land that finds homogeneity through appreciation of its environment. The fairy stories and folk tales that form the basic imagistic lexicon of, for instance, "A Faery Song"

"We who are old, old and gay, O so old! Thousands of years, thousands of years, If I were told." (Yeats, 1987: 43)

Connects Yeats with Ireland's bardic past, as Morton Irving-Seidin states in his book William Butler Yeats: The Poet as Mythmaker 1865-1939 (1962):"The literary traditional of Gaelic Ireland falls into two main currents, of which the first includes the bardic stories of the Red Branch Tribe of Ulster and the Fenians of Connacht and their successors." (Seidin, 1962: 6)

This is myth making and myth reinvention on a national scale; not only through his poetry but through his many dramas for the Abbey theatre, Yeats attempted to concretize an Irish aesthetic by reinterpreting and reinventing the tales and stories of Ireland's past; a semi-mythological psycho-temporal space that remained unsullied by the current and recurring political issues.

In poems like "Sailing to Byzantium" (Yeats, 1987: 217) we see this aesthetic vision devoid of the mythologized Ireland, the images and poetic allusions in this poem once again both evoke and create an artistic past, but this time it is a aristocratic past; a history, not of the folk tale, but of the landed, leisured, vibrant aesthetic; not of the bard anymore but the "drowsy Emperor" (Yeats, 1987: 218): "Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such as Grecian Goldsmith's make Of hammered gold and gold enalling. To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come." (Yeats, 1987: 218)


W. B Yeats’ poem The Second Coming has been seen as an example of modern zeitgeist literature (Hone,1962, Brandbury, Tratner,1995) at once depicting the de-centering and internal fissure of twentieth century culture and elegising the parting of a classical psychological period.

Yeats portrays that though war has been ended, it's effects are continuously affecting the people of modern age. He says that there remains insecurity and disorder everywhere. Yeats feels gloomy and fears of a stormy future. He knows that the world is full of disorder and there "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world "

W. H. Auden in his Ken You Review essay, 1948 entitled "Yeats as an example", notes that Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate choice of the principles and presumptions in terms of which(made) sense of his experience". Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written some of the most beautiful poetry" of modern times. 

W B Yeats biography by Nobel Prize org.  

More info about Yeats 

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