A Prayer for My Daughter

William Butler Yeats was, as the Norton Anthology authors state, an Irish cultural nationalist. Yeats has several different types of styles; the Irish poet, the anti-nationalist poet, and the cosmopolitan poet. Yeats is most famous for his war poems but he always write his best when he relates his work to his own personal experience. His poem, “Easter, 1916” was considered one of his masterpiece works because, writing as a anti-nationalist, he tries to relate to these people, who have been working for wealthier people their entire life and it’s like you’re under them, you will never be equal to them. In the Norton Anthology Yeats wrote in his first stanza at the end, “A terrible beauty is born” (Line 16). I think what he means by that is it’s terrible because of the riot going on and how numerous, innocent people died an unnecessary death. As for the beauty part I believe that it opened up Ireland’s eye. So even though a lot of people died, in a way it was probably meant to be because it it hand’t happened, this would have gone on longer and would never be over. All this created the freedom of Ireland. It was very well written and well stated.
I believe Yeats relates a lot of his works together, for example, The Second Coming, which is related to his work that he wrote about after which is, A Prayer for My Daughter. The Second Coming is one of his war poems in which he talks about the degradation of society and to not be deceived my the glorified war. The reason I say I believe they have a connection is because in A Prayer to My Daughter, his tone describes the political condition of the country in which he did in The Second Coming. He feels foreboding and worried about her as you can see in lines 13-16:
“Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.”
A Prayer for Daughter is written in ten stanzas and in each stanza it contains eight lines. The rhyming scheme is a bit weird, the first two couplet rhymes and the 5th and 8th lines rhyme and the 6th and 7th rhyme. Yeats was considered one of the greatest writers during his time and he even called himself, as the Norton Anthology states, “king of the cats’.