A Prayer for My Daughter

Both elm and laurel trees appear in “A Prayer for my Daughter,” but the laurel reappears in several stanzas, emphasizing it over the one description of the elms that decorate Thoor Ballylee, where the poem is set. The laurel tree echoes Greek mythology in other stanzas. In Greek myth, Daphne rejected the advances of Apollo and asked the river god to help her escape; the river god turned her into a laurel tree, thwarting Apollo’s chase. This myth—as well as the laurel crown seen in sporting events (and other competitions)—casts the laurel as a symbol of victory and autonomy.

The laurel first appears in stanza six as a “flourishing hidden tree” (Line41) that the father prays his daughter will become and, at the end of this stanza, he hopes she will “live like some green laurel / Rooted in one dear perpetual place” (Lines47-48). This comparison places Yeats’sdaughter Anne in the role of Daphne: She has security and safety from violence.

In a political reading, the symbol of the laurel informs the outcome for the Irish nationalists: victory in the war for independence. Because he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—whose membership also included the creators of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck—Yeats was involved with popularizing the use of the laurel wreath as a symbol for victory in a system of divination (as in the Six of Wands card).