edna longley
and leading to inevitable murder’. He particularly dreaded that ‘Ireland...(under
theinfluence of its lunatic faculty of going against everything it believes England
to affirm)’ might give itself to ‘Marxian revolution’.^59 In ‘Prayer’ this fear coalesces
with more valid fears, encrypted into the refrain of ‘Easter, 1916’: ‘A terrible beauty
is born’.^60 Maud Gonne, anti-type of the poem’s female ideal, was then in Holloway
jail. Sinn Fein’s success in the UK election of December 1918 had boosted the first
phase of the IRA’s guerrilla offensive. Attacks on the police were increasing. Thus
Yeats’s daughter magnetizes other births: revolutionary Russia; an Irish ‘terror’; or,
alternatively, an Irish state fit for ‘innocence and beauty’.
‘Prayer’ moves in a contrary gyre to that of ‘The Second Coming’—from
apocalypse to pastoral utopia—starting where its precursor leaves off:
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
Mychildsleepson.Thereisnoobstacle
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.^61West-of-Ireland weather and landscape allow Yeats to bring wild nature and human
settlement, anarchy and security, into emblematic opposition. ‘Howling’ (which
mobs do) and ‘levelling’ have political implications. Later, a sea-wind ‘screams
upon the tower’, and Gonne’s ‘opinionated mind’ produces ‘an old bellows full
of angry wind’. While ‘Prayer’ sets Gonne against Yeats’s wife, it does not simply
advise women to exchange ‘opinions’ for marriageable ‘glad kindness’. Rather, Yeats
dramatizes a quarrel in (and about) his own ‘mind’: political rhetoric (screaming
sea-wind), which distorts more than voice, versus poetry (the tower, a linnet’s
song). This dialectic enquires how Yeats’s poetry might negotiate ‘the future years’,
projected as a kind of Bacchanalian war dance: ‘Dancing to a frenzied drum’.
The way in which the poem modulates its own rhetoric, and conceives a utopian
counter-aesthetic, depends upon a mustering of pastoral resources.
Virgil’sEclogueswas a point of reference for Yeats. Behind ‘Prayer’ we may discern
the Fourth Eclogue (of which more below) in which a dynastically significant birth
heralds a second ‘golden age’. Classical pastoral characterizes the golden age as earth
pouring forth its abundance without need of cultivation. Whereas the goddess-like
Gonne has ‘undone’ ‘the Horn of Plenty’ by abusing her gifts, the poet prays that
his daughter may become ‘a flourishing hidden tree|That all her thoughts may like
the linnet be,|And have no business but dispensing round|Their magnanimities
(^59) Yeats to George Russell (A. E.),? Apr. 1919, inThe Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 656.
(^60) Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’, inPoems, 228. (^61) Yeats, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, ibid. 236.