A Prayer for My Daughter

Miranda (The Tempest). John William Waterhouse. 1916.

 

A Prayer for My Daughter

William Butler Yeats, 1919

 

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-legg’d 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 kindess cannot take his eyes.

 

May she become a flourishing hidden tree

That all her thought may like the linnet be,

And have no business but dispensing rounf

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 is 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 bellow’s 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.

 

Yeats’ prayer for his daughter may be my favorite poem. Here, the “murderous innocence” of the stormy sea causes him to think of what the future years may hold for the baby girl asleep in her cradle. He prays that she would be given kindness, wisdom, charm, and gladness, and that she would enjoy the prosperity and permanence of a “flourishing hidden tree.”

William Butler Yeats wrote the poem while staying in the tower at Thoor Ballylee during the Anglo-Irish War, two days after the birth of his daughter Anne in February 1919. The storm may be symbolic of the Irish struggle for Independence, a frequent topic of Yeats’s poetry. “A Prayer for My Daughter,” considered an important work in Modernist poetry, was published in 1921, in the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer.

More than once in his “Prayer,” Yeats asks that his daughter would be like a green laurel tree. Feminists have decried Yeats for wishing his daughter to be a “vegetable: immobile, unthinking, and placid.” But a rooted tree has ever been the symbol of fruitfulness, beauty, and strength. (The laurel tree, specifically, is a symbol of victory and nobility.) The Psalmist sings of the righteous man, “He shall be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall propser.” The upright “shall never be moved”; the immobility here does not connote paralyzation or barrenness, but growth, fruitfulness, and continuance. “The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.”

Generations

The Woodcutter. Jules Bastien-Lepage.

 

Generations

Amy Lowell, 1919

 

You are like the stem

Of a young beech-tree,

Straight and swaying,

Breaking out in golden leaves.

Your walk is like the blowing of a beech-tree

On a hill.

Your voice is like leaves

Softly struck upon by a South wind.

Your shadow is no shadow, but a scattered sunshine;

And at night you pull the sky down to you

And hood yourself in stars.

 

But I am like a great oak under a cloudy sky,

Watching a stripling beech grow up at my feet.

Prayer [I]

Prayer Before Meal. Jan Steen. 1660.

 

Prayer [I]

George Herbert

 

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth,

Engine against th’Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

 

A Little Poetry—My birthday falls on a Sunday this year, and I am celebrating with a favorite poem by a favorite religious poet. George Herbert presents in this poem an almost rhapsodic cascade of images—sometimes startling—of Christian prayer; human language is overwhelmed by divine plenitude.

Malcolm Guite shares on his blog an excellent excerpt about Herbert’s sonnet, from the book Faith, Hope, and Poetry. <http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/george-herbert-and-the-insights-of-prayer/>

A ‘plummet’ is a plumb line, used for measuring depth. An ‘engine’ is a mechanical device used in warfare.

Sonnet XX

Welcome Footsteps. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. 1833.

 

Sonnet XX

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 

Beloved, my Beloved, when I think

That thou wast in the world a year ago,

What time I sat alone here in the snow

And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink

No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,

Went counting all my chains as if that so

They never could fall off at any blow

Struck by thy possible hand,—why, thus I drink

Of life’s great cup of wonder! Wonderful,

Never to feel thee thrill the day or night

With personal act or speech,—nor ever cull

Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white

Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,

Who cannot guess God’s presence out of sight.

 

The poem is a submission of Erica L. of Mitchell Drive.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Shepherd and Shepherdess Reposing. François Boucher. 1761.

 

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Christopher Marlowe

 

Come live with me and by my Love

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

 

There will we sit upon the rocks

And see the shepherd feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers, to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

 

There will I make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.

 

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull,

Fair linéd slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold.

 

A belt of straw and ivy buds

With coral clasps and amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me and be my Love.

 

Thy silver dishes for thy meat

As precious as the gods do eat,

Shall on an ivory table be

Prepared each day for thee and me.

 

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me and be my Love.

 

Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd,” first published in 1599 (six years after his untimely death), is one of the most well-known love poems in the English language.  It has inspired a number of poetic responses, the most famous of which is by Sir Walter Raleigh. “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” is often interpreted as a direct criticism of Marlowe’s pastoral idyll by the older poet.

The Cloud

About the Picturesque Storm in the Mountains. Thomas Locker.

 

The Cloud

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

From the mountains and the sea;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid

In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken

The sweet buds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,

As she dances around the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,

And whiten the green plains under,

And then again I dissolve it in rain,

And laugh as I pass in thunder.

 

I sift the snow on the mountains below,

And their great pines grown agast;

And all the night ’tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast.

Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,

Lightning my pilot sits,

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,

It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,

This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move

In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,

Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream

The Spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in heaven’s blue smile,

Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

 

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

And his burning plume outspread,

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,

When the morning star shines dead.

As on the jag of a mountain crag

Which an earthquake rocks and swings

An eagle alit one mountain may breathe from the lit sea beneath

Its ardours of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of heaven above,

With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,

As still as a brooding dove.

 

That orbéd maiden with white fire laden,

Whom mortals call the moon,

Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor,

By the midnight breezes strewn;

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,

Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof,

The stars peep behind her and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,

Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of sky fallen through me on high,

Are each paved with the moon and these.

 

I bind the sun’s throne with a burning zone,

And the moon’s with a girdle of pearl;

The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,

When the whirlwinds my banners unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,

Over a torrent sea,

Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,

The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch through which I march

With hurricane, fire, and snow,

When the powers of the air are chained to my chair,

Is the million-coloured bow;

The sphere-fire above its soft-colours wove,

While the moist earth was laughing below.

 

I am the daughter of earth and water,

And the nursling of the sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain when with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

 

A Little Poetry—The opening lines from Shelley’s poem “The Cloud” caused me to write it down on my memorization list before I even finished reading it. I loved the first-person narration, the beautiful imagery, the internal rhyme, and the gentle rhythm.

Weeks later, on a whim (because I thought the title was interesting), I borrowed from the library a book called The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies. It tells the story of how a modest, little-known Quaker exploded into scientific fame with his lecture on “The Modifications of Clouds.” It was Luke Howard who captured those fanciful vapors with the names we still use today; and I was fascinated when I discovered that Shelley’s poem, though Romantic, was also clearly informed by Howard’s scientific observations. (This little coincidence reminded me of Laura Wood’s suspicion that “angels have specific intellectual interests and like to interfere with our reading.”)

A Fine Picture—Locker is an artist of the second-generation Hudson River School, and his natural landscapes are exceptionally beautiful. He is masterful in his depictions of clouds, which made me immediately think of him when deciding on today’s artwork.

The Oak and the Ash

Haymaking. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 1565.

 

The Oak and the Ash

 

A north country maid up to London had strayed,

Although with her nature it did not agree.

So she wept and she sighed, and bitterly she cried,

“Oh! I wish once again in the north I could be!

Oh! the oak and the ash and the bonnie ivy tree,

They all grow so green in my own country.”

 

“While sadly I roam I regret my dear home

“Where the lads and young lasses are making the hay,

“Where the birds sweetly sing and the merry bells do ring,

“And the maidens and meadows are pleasant and gay.

“O! the oak and the ash and the bonnie ivy tree,

They all grow so green in my own country.”

 

“No doubt, did I please, I could marry with ease;

“Where maidens are fair, many lovers will come.

“But he whom I wed must be north-country bred

“And must carry me back to my north-country home.

“O! the oak and the ash and the bonnie ivy tree,

“They all grow so green in my own country.”

 

In this wistful English ballad, a country-maid who has gone to London longs to return to the northern home where flourishes “the oak and the ash and the bonnie ivy tree.” The above is one of several versions known as the “North Country Maid.” One of the earliest of these would have her hail from the Dalby Forest in the northern Yorkshire moors (today a popular location for cyclists). The oak and the ash still flourish there, as do cherry, birch, larch, and Scots pine.

I always find interesting when researching folksong the many variations in the lyrics (a consequence of the dynamic oral tradition). The full version of the song extend the maiden’s reminiscences of her home and her resolve to mary only a lad that is North Countrie bred.” <http://www.contemplator.com/england/oakash.html>

The chorus that gives the song its name is attributed to Martin Parker, a prolific writer of ballads whose work was often borrowed. Others (and especially the Scots) appropriated these two lines in numerous poems and songs. While the oak and the ash seem to be permanent fixtures, the third “bonnie” tree might be an ivy, elum (elm), rowan, willow, or birken (birch).

The north-country versions of the sung are sung to the tune “Quodling’s Delight,” which has been traced as far back as 1608, and is perhaps older.

You can listen to folk and pop singer Marianne Faithfull sing “North County Maid” at YouTube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_awLg5mbMA>

Florida at Dawn

Backwoods Dawn. A. E. Backus

 

Florida at Dawn

Will Wallace Harney

 

The moon is low in the sky,

And a sweet south wind is blowing

Where the bergamot blossoms breathe and die

In the orchard’s scented snowing;

But the stars are few, and scattered lie

Where the sinking moon is going.

 

With a love-sweet ache a strain

Of the night’s delicious fluting

Strs in the heart, with as sweet a pain

As the flower feels in fruiting,

And the soft air breathes a breath of rain

Over buds and tendril shooting.

 

For the sweet nights faints and dies,

Like the blush when love confesses

Its passion dusk to the cheeks and eyes

And dies in its sweet distresses,

And the radiant mystery fills the skies

Of possible happinesses,

 

Till the sun breakes out on sheaves

And mouths of a pink perfume,

Where the milky bergamot shakes its leaves;

And the rainbow’s ribboned bloom,

Of the soft gray mist of the morning, weaves

A rose in the rose’s loom.

 

The fog, like a great white cloth,

Draws out the orchard and corn,

And melts away in a film of froth

Like the milk spray on the thorn;

And out of her chamber’s blush and loath,

Like a bride, comes the girlish morn.

 

While Backus’s painting depicts dawn in the rough piney backwoods of Florida, Harney’s poem describes a southern morning breaking over corn fields and banks of fragrant bergamot.