A Prayer for my daughter

These lines and verses are from A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER by W.B.Yeats

1^st verse last two lines
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind

2. I have walked and prayed for this child an hour
…5^th line 2^nd Verse
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come
Dancing to the frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
3^rd Verse
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eyes 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
6^th Verse
May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but the 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.
7^th verse 6^th line
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
8^th Verse
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 quite natures understood
For an old bellows full of the angry wind?
9^th Verse

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that 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
10^th Verse
And may her bridegroom bring her to a home
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 is a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
June 1919