A Prayer for My Daughter | ISC Class 11 Modern English Literature Notes

This note covers William Butler Yeats and the poem’s speaking voice, the ten stanzas, the storm and the sleeping child, beauty and kindness, hatred and inner peace, poetic form, recurring images, themes, and short quotations.

Who wrote the poem, and what kind of prayer does it present?

William Butler Yeats wrote A Prayer for My Daughter. Its title identifies both the act of praying and the person for whom the prayer is offered. The speaking voice is a father thinking about his daughter’s future while she sleeps during a violent storm.

The speaker is the voice that speaks within a poem. Here, he reports his own walking, praying, memories and fears. The daughter does not speak. We encounter her through his concern and through the qualities he hopes she will develop.

The poem is a lyric, a poem centred on personal feeling and reflection. Its prayer expands beyond physical protection. The father considers beauty, friendship, courtesy, freedom from hatred, inward happiness and a future household shaped by established customs.

A stanza is a group of lines forming a unit within a poem. This poem has ten stanzas of eight lines each, making eighty lines. The movement from the present storm towards an imagined married future gives the prayer a developing argument.

Prayer and prediction differ. Repeated wishes express what the father desires, not what certainly happens. His daughter remains a sleeping child in the opening situation. The mature character and marriage he imagines belong to the future he hopes to secure.

The father also admits disappointment in minds and forms of beauty he has loved. His advice therefore grows out of personal experience within the poem. His judgements should be recognised as his perspective, especially when he generalises about beauty, opinions and women’s choices.

What happens in the poem’s stanza-by-stanza summary?

Stanza 1: Why is the father praying?

A storm is howling while the child sleeps, partly hidden beneath the cradle’s hood and coverlid, meaning bed covering. Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill offer the only obstacles mentioned against the Atlantic wind, whose force can level haystacks and roofs.

The father has walked and prayed for an hour because his mind is deeply troubled. The child’s rest and the adult’s anxiety exist together. The opening gives the prayer a physical occasion while making clear that the father’s inward gloom matters as much as the weather.

Stanza 2: How does the storm become a fear of the future?

The father hears the wind around the tower, beneath the bridge’s arches and in the elm trees above a flooded stream. A reverie is an absorbed waking train of thoughts or imaginings. In his excited reverie, the years ahead seem to arrive dancing wildly.

The imagined dance follows a frenzied drum and comes out of the sea’s destructive innocence. The future is not described as an observed event. It is pictured through the father’s agitated imagination, which turns the sounds outside into a vision of threatening years to come.

Stanza 3: What kind of beauty does he want?

He wishes his daughter to have beauty, but not so much that it distracts strangers or absorbs her own attention before a mirror. He fears that excessive beauty may be treated as a complete purpose in itself, weakening concern for other people.

He associates such self-sufficiency with losing natural kindness and, maybe, the intimate understanding that reveals the heart and helps someone choose rightly. His concern ends with friendship. The qualification matters: the prayer’s warning must not become a claim that every beautiful person necessarily lacks kindness.

Stanza 4: How do the examples challenge beauty’s promise?

The father recalls Helen finding life dull and later suffering trouble from a fool. He then describes a great queen who rose from sea spray, could choose freely, yet selected a smith with bent legs as her husband.

The Horn of Plenty is an emblem of abundance and good gifts. The speaker suggests that foolish choices can undo such advantages. His strange image of a crazy salad makes the warning vivid: beauty and plentiful gifts do not, in his argument, ensure wise decisions.

Stanza 5: Why does courtesy matter more?

Courtesy means considerate, gracious conduct towards others. The father wants this to be his daughter’s chief lesson. He contrasts receiving affection as an automatic gift with earning it through qualities that do not depend on complete physical beauty.

He reflects on people who have behaved foolishly for beauty but been made wiser by charm. He also imagines a wandering man, who has loved and believed himself loved, becoming absorbed by cheerful kindness. The emphasis moves towards relationships sustained by conduct.

Stanza 6: What do the tree and bird express?

The father wishes his daughter to become like a flourishing hidden tree. He compares her thoughts to a linnet, a small songbird, sharing generous music. Magnanimities means acts or expressions of generosity and largeness of spirit.

Her pursuits and quarrels should arise in merriment, meaning cheerful play, rather than hostility. He then wishes her to resemble a green laurel, an evergreen tree or shrub, rooted in one cherished, lasting place. Growth, generous expression and stability belong together in this wish.

Stanza 7: What has the father learnt from disappointment?

The father’s own mind has recently felt dried up because the minds and beauty he has admired have prospered little. He nevertheless recognises that being consumed by hate may well be the greatest of misfortunes. His admission gives the advice a personally troubled background.

He imagines the wind unable to tear the linnet from its leaf if hatred is absent from the mind. The bird and tree return, but now they illustrate inward resistance. This is a claim about mental or spiritual security, not a literal rule about birds surviving storms.

Stanza 8: Why does he condemn intellectual hatred?

Intellectual hatred means hatred sustained by thought or rigidly held opinions. The father calls it the worst hatred and wishes his daughter to regard opinions as accursed, meaning condemned or harmful. This is a forceful expression of his fear of destructive conviction.

He remembers an exceptionally beautiful woman who, because of her opinionated mind, exchanged abundant gifts for angry emptiness. Bellows are a device that blows air into a fire. Here, old bellows filled with angry wind represent what the speaker sees as a ruinous exchange.

Stanza 9: How can happiness survive hostility?

Once hatred is driven away, the soul recovers radical innocence, innocence at its root or deepest foundation. It learns that it can generate its own delight, calm and fear. The father imagines its purified will becoming harmonious with heaven’s will.

He therefore believes his daughter can remain happy even if faces scowl, winds howl and bellows burst. The hostility has not disappeared. The hope is that inward freedom from hatred allows her happiness to endure despite the surrounding disorder.

Stanza 10: What is the final wish?

The father wishes her bridegroom to bring her into a household governed by custom, established ways of living, and ceremony, formal observances that give shared life order. He contrasts this household with public streets where arrogance and hatred seem to be traded.

A thoroughfare is a public road or street. The closing question links innocence and beauty to custom and ceremony. The horn of abundance and spreading laurel return, so the ending gathers earlier wishes for generosity and rooted growth into a picture of ordered domestic life.

How does the storm reveal the father’s state of mind?

What belongs to the physical setting?

The poem begins with a contrast, a placing together of unlike conditions: the child sleeps while the wind howls and the father remains troubled. The cradle gives a small area of shelter. Beyond it, the wind threatens the larger landscape and its buildings.

The setting includes Gregory’s Wood, a bare hill, the Atlantic, a tower, a bridge, elm trees and a flooded stream. These details establish exposure to powerful weather. The wood and hill are barriers against the wind, but the storm remains threatening.

The repeated sounds of wind spread across the surroundings. The father hears it at several locations, making escape from its presence seem difficult. His hour of walking and praying measures his sustained concern, while the child remains unaware of the mental drama around her.

What does the father imagine?

Personification gives human action or qualities to something non-human. In lines 13 to 16, future years appear to dance to a frenzied drum. The future takes on restless movement, as though the storm has given the father’s fears a visible form.

The sea combines destructive power with innocence. It can harm without possessing a human intention to harm. This tension helps explain why the father cannot simply reason away his fear: the world may threaten the child without directing a personal grievance against her.

The later wind imagery changes the question from physical shelter to inward strength. The father cannot promise calm weather throughout her life. He instead seeks a character that will retain generosity and happiness when hostility continues. The opening storm remains relevant to the entire prayer.

Why does the father place kindness and courtesy above excessive beauty?

Does he reject beauty itself?

Measured beauty is the wish in stanza 3. The father asks for beauty and immediately qualifies it. His concern is the way exceptional beauty may dominate the attention of both its possessor and others, displacing the qualities needed for sound relationships.

The mirror directs attention back towards the self. By contrast, intimate friendship requires an understanding that reaches another person’s heart. The stanza therefore distinguishes being looked at from being known. Attraction alone does not provide the mutual knowledge involved in friendship.

The speaker uses the word maybe when discussing the loss of intimate understanding. A careful account preserves that uncertainty. It should also preserve his point of view: the stanza presents a worried father’s judgement, not a demonstrated law about everyone who possesses beauty.

How do the examples develop his reasoning?

An allusion is a brief reference to another story, person or tradition. Stanza 4 uses allusions to Helen and the sea-born queen to challenge the assumption that extraordinary beauty guarantees contentment or wise choice. The poem concentrates on disappointment and selection.

The queen is conventionally identified as Aphrodite, the Greek goddess associated with love and beauty, and the smith as Hephaestus, the craftsman god.

The speaker’s image of abundant gifts being undone leads into his alternative: earned affection. Courtesy offers a way to form bonds through attention and kindness. This shifts the argument from what someone possesses naturally to how that person behaves towards others.

Why is kindness active rather than merely decorative?

Stanza 5 describes kindness as glad, giving it warmth and animation. It can hold the attention of someone disappointed or confused in love. The father values an outward generosity that changes the experience of others, rather than manners performed without feeling.

The following stanza extends that idea through the singing bird. Generous thought resembles music shared freely. Courtesy, kindness and the linnet’s imagined song belong to one developing ideal: a person whose inner life produces welcome effects in the lives of those around her.

How do hatred, innocence and rootedness shape the prayer?

Why does the father turn towards his own disappointments?

In stanza 7, the dried mind contrasts with the flourishing tree of stanza 6. The father describes a failure of vitality in himself after seeing admired minds and beauty prosper little. The prayer is therefore spoken by someone who recognises frustration in his own life.

He does not present hatred as a harmless response to disappointment. Being choked with it may well be the greatest misfortune. In the next stanza, he more firmly calls intellectual hatred the worst form of hatred. These statements differ in strength and should remain distinct.

His rejection of opinions is sweeping. The immediate concern is an opinionated mind that destroys valuable gifts. A sympathetic reading sees a warning against rigid hostility, but the actual wish goes further than simply recommending polite disagreement. Its restrictive force should not be concealed.

What sort of innocence can be recovered?

Recovered innocence belongs to a soul from which hatred has been expelled. It is not simply lack of experience. The father imagines a deeper freedom in which the soul discovers its capacity to delight itself, calm itself and also frighten itself.

Including fear in this sequence prevents a shallow reading of inward happiness. The mind is capable of creating distress as well as comfort. The prayer imagines spiritual independence through understanding and purification, rather than a life in which unpleasant feelings can never arise.

The daughter’s possible happiness is expressed through can, not a report that she will certainly be happy. Scowling faces and violent winds remain in the picture. The achievement the father hopes for is endurance amid hostility, not the removal of every outward difficulty.

How does the ending connect inward and outward order?

The house shaped by custom and ceremony gives the desired character a social setting. In the father’s vision, repeated practices help sustain innocence and beauty. The spreading laurel suggests continuing life within rooted belonging, while the horn suggests a store of generous possibilities.

There is also a tension between care and restriction. The father wants his daughter to flourish, but imagines that flourishing within one cherished place and a ceremonious marriage. The ending can be read both as a loving wish for security and as a bounded ideal of her future.

How do rhyme, imagery and poetic devices support the meaning?

What is the rhyme scheme?

Rhyme scheme means the arrangement of similar line-ending sounds. The poem’s underlying pattern is AABBCDDC. Each letter labels a sound group: matching letters indicate corresponding end sounds. The labels restart for each stanza rather than naming one sound throughout the poem.

In stanza 2, lines 9 to 16 end with hour, tower, scream, stream, reverie, come, drum and sea. Hour and tower form the first pair; scream and stream form the second; reverie corresponds with sea around the inner come and drum pair.

Some correspondences elsewhere are less exact. Slant rhyme means partial rather than complete sound correspondence; obstacle and hill in stanza 1 illustrate the looseness of the pattern. It is therefore misleading to describe every pairing as an exact rhyme.

How does rhythm organise the prayer?

Metre is a recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is a metrical unit in which an unstressed syllable precedes a stressed one. Pentameter has five metrical units in a line; tetrameter has four.

The poem generally uses iambic pentameter with shorter sixth and seventh lines, often described as tetrameter, within its eight-line stanzas. Actual speech stresses vary. The patterned form can be read as an effort to organise the father’s anxiety into a sustained, controlled prayer.

How do sensory images become symbols?

Imagery is language that evokes sensory experience. The howling and screaming wind in lines 1 and 10 to 12 creates sound imagery. The cradle and covering create an image of shelter, while the flooded stream reinforces the force of the storm.

A symbol is an image that carries meaning beyond its literal identity. The tree in lines 41 to 48 suggests growth and rootedness; the linnet suggests generous thought or expression. Their return in lines 54 to 56 connects inward stability with resistance to destructive pressure.

A metaphor describes something through another thing without an explicit comparison word. The daughter becoming a flourishing hidden tree in line 41 is metaphorical. A simile makes an explicit comparison, as when her thoughts resemble the linnet in line 42 and she resembles the laurel in line 47.

Which other devices sharpen the argument?

Oxymoron brings apparently contradictory terms together. In line 16, murderous innocence joins destruction with absence of guilt. The related paradox, an apparently contradictory idea that can reveal meaning, is that innocent nature may nevertheless produce devastating harm.

Alliteration repeats initial consonant sounds in neighbouring words. The repeated h sounds in the opening line’s howling, half and hid connect the storm with the partly concealed child. The effect depends on sound, not merely on words sharing written letters.

A rhetorical question is asked to press an argument rather than obtain information. Lines 59 to 64 challenge the value of opinionated anger through the woman’s exchange. Lines 77 and 78 press the father’s belief that custom and ceremony nurture innocence and beauty.

Repetition gives recurring words or patterns emphasis. Walking and praying recur across the first two stanzas; wishes introduced by may recur later. The horn, tree and wind also return with developing associations, joining different stages of the poem’s argument.

What themes and central message emerge from the poem?

Parental love and uncertainty

The father’s love appears through sustained attention to a child who cannot yet respond. His concern extends from the immediate storm to her adult relationships. The repeated act of praying also admits a limit: he can wish and imagine, but cannot directly control the years ahead.

Character and the limits of outward gifts

Beauty is desirable but insufficient in the father’s argument. Courtesy, natural kindness and intimate understanding matter because they shape relationships. The movement from the mirror to earned affection contrasts absorption in appearance with qualities that allow people to form lasting bonds.

Freedom from hatred and inward happiness

The central moral hope is that the daughter will resist hatred. The poem links hatred with choking, angry wind and the waste of abundance. Its alternative is a soul able to recover innocence and remain happy even when the surrounding world is unfriendly.

Generosity and rooted belonging

The bird and tree bring generosity and stability together. The daughter’s thoughts should give freely, like song, while her life should possess the security of roots. The ideal contains activity and growth, not simply stillness, although its attachment to one place can feel restrictive.

Custom, ceremony and the limits of the father’s vision

The father treats tradition, inherited ways of living, as a support for beauty and innocence. Yet the future he imagines gives the daughter no spoken response. A critical reading can recognise the affection behind the prayer while questioning how much independent choice its ideal allows.

The central message is best expressed as the father’s hope that inward goodness, generous relationships and ordered belonging can sustain happiness amid disorder. This formulation keeps the storm and the ethical wishes connected without turning the prayer into a universal promise of protection.

Which key quotations help answer interpretive questions?

Each short quotation below belongs to the father’s speaking voice. Its significance depends on its place in the prayer. Interpretation means explaining how the words and their context produce meaning, rather than simply repeating the statement in different words.

How do the opening and beauty warning establish the problem?

“Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.”

Speaker and context: The father, stanza 1, explains his walking and praying. The immediate subject is his mental distress; the sleeping daughter is not described as sharing it.

“Lose natural kindness and maybe”

Speaker and context: The father, stanza 3, warns about excessive beauty. The unfinished movement into the next line matters: maybe qualifies the possible loss of heart-revealing intimacy.

Which lines express positive wishes?

“Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned”

Speaker and context: The father, stanza 5, values courtesy. Affection is treated as a relationship developed through conduct, rather than an automatic reward for appearance.

“Rooted in one dear perpetual place.”

Speaker and context: The father, stanza 6, completes the laurel comparison. Perpetual means lasting continuously; the wish emphasises cherished belonging and stability.

Which lines connect the inner life with the ending?

“May well be of all evil chances chief.”

Speaker and context: The father, stanza 7, considers the danger of being choked with hate. The wording preserves a strong judgement expressed with qualification.

“The soul recovers radical innocence”

Speaker and context: The father, stanza 9, imagines hatred expelled. Innocence is recovered at the soul’s root; it is not simply the child’s present lack of experience.

“And custom for the spreading laurel tree.”

Speaker and context: The father, stanza 10, closes by connecting customary life with rooted growth. The earlier tree image becomes part of the final household ideal.

Glossary

• Coverlid — A bed covering that helps shelter the sleeping child beneath the cradle hood.
• Reverie — An absorbed waking train of thought or imagination, here excited by the storm.
• Distraught — Deeply agitated or distracted, as the father fears an observer may become through beauty.
• Courtesy — Considerate and gracious behaviour towards other people, valued as a means of earning affection.
• Horn of Plenty — An emblem of abundance, representing valuable gifts that the speaker believes can be wasted.
• Linnet — A small songbird whose generous music becomes an image for the daughter’s desired thoughts.
• Magnanimities — Expressions of generosity and largeness of spirit, associated here with the giving of song.
• Laurel — An evergreen tree or shrub used to suggest rootedness, continuing growth and cherished belonging.
• Intellectual hatred — Hatred sustained by thought or rigid opinions, which the father regards as especially destructive.
• Bellows — A device for blowing air into a fire, used here to represent angry emptiness.
• Radical innocence — Innocence restored at the soul’s deepest root after hatred has been driven away.
• Custom — An established way of behaving or living, presented as a support for household order.
• Ceremony — Formal observance that gives shared life order and, in the prayer, supports innocence and beauty.
• Thoroughfares — Public roads or streets, imagined as places where arrogance and hatred are offered for sale.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: The father wants his daughter to be unattractive. Correct: He asks for beauty, while fearing the self-absorption and disruption he associates with excessive beauty.
• Misconception: Every statement about beauty is an objective fact. Correct: These are the speaker’s judgements, shaped by anxiety and disappointment; the qualification maybe must also be preserved.
• Misconception: The storm ends when the father finds hope. Correct: The later prayer imagines happiness despite continued howling, scowling and destructive anger; it does not report the weather clearing.
• Misconception: The sleeping daughter speaks the prayer. Correct: Her father speaks, remembers and imagines; her own view of his proposed future is not expressed.
• Misconception: Innocence simply means knowing nothing. Correct: The later innocence is recovered through freedom from hatred and recognition of the soul’s inward powers.
• Misconception: Opinions are condemned only when politely expressed. Correct: The warning arises from destructive, opinionated hatred; the father’s actual wish against opinions is sweeping and should not be softened.
• Misconception: The tree promises literal immunity from injury. Correct: The tree and bird express spiritual resilience and generosity, rather than physical invulnerability.
• Misconception: Every line has the same length and every rhyme is exact. Correct: Shorter lines and partial sound correspondences vary the poem’s underlying metrical and rhyme patterns.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. The child sleeps beneath a cradle hood and covering while the father walks and prays in gloom during a howling storm. Explain two contrasts in this situation. [2 marks]

1. The sleeping child is physically still, whereas the father is active, walking and praying.
2. Her peaceful rest contrasts with his troubled mind and the threatening noise outside her sheltered cradle.

Q2. The father asks for beauty but fears excessive attention to appearance, the loss of kindness and maybe intimate understanding, and failure to find friendship. Explain three aspects of this wish, preserving its qualification. [3 marks]

1. He desires beauty for his daughter, but wants it balanced by qualities that sustain relationships rather than allowing appearance to become her entire purpose.
2. His fear connects excessive beauty with weakened kindness and the possible loss of intimate understanding. The word maybe preserves uncertainty about that latter loss.
3. Friendship is the measure of what might be damaged: attracting attention does not by itself establish the mutual knowledge required for a close bond.

Q3. In stanza 6, the daughter is imagined as a flourishing hidden tree, her thoughts as a linnet generously sharing song, her quarrels as playful, and her life as a laurel rooted in one dear place. Explain these four wishes. [4 marks]

1. The flourishing tree suggests a life of healthy growth, while its hidden position points towards a sheltered existence away from excessive public attention.
2. The linnet represents thoughts that give freely and pleasantly to others, making the daughter’s inner life a source of generosity.
3. Playful quarrels express the hope that disagreement will remain cheerful and free from the destructive hostility the father fears.
4. The rooted laurel suggests lasting attachment to a cherished place, combining security and belonging with continuing life and growth.

Q4. The father says hatred may well be the greatest misfortune, calls intellectual hatred the worst hatred, remembers a woman exchanging abundant gifts for angry bellows, imagines the soul recovering innocence and discovering its own powers of delight and calm, and hopes his daughter can remain happy despite hostility. Trace this argument in five points. [5 marks]

1. The qualified judgement that hatred may well be the greatest misfortune identifies inward bitterness as a serious danger without removing the speaker’s chosen qualification.
2. His next judgement singles out intellectual hatred, hostility sustained by rigid thought or opinion, as the most damaging form of hatred.
3. The remembered exchange turns the warning into a picture of loss: valuable abundance is surrendered for something associated with emptiness and angry noise.
4. The recovery of innocence offers the positive alternative. Once hatred is expelled, the soul can rediscover inward resources for delight and peace.
5. The argument ends with resilience rather than perfect surroundings. The daughter can remain happy although hostility continues, because her inner condition need not imitate it.

Q5. Stanza 2 has these line endings in order: hour, tower, scream, stream, reverie, come, drum, sea. Using letters to label corresponding sounds, state the rhyme scheme and explain its final four-line arrangement. [2 marks]

1. The underlying rhyme scheme is AABBCDDC, with matching letters indicating corresponding line-ending sounds.
2. The final four lines place the come and drum pair inside the correspondence between reverie and sea.

Q6. Consider four details: future years dance to a frenzied drum; the daughter becomes a tree; her thoughts are like a linnet; the sea combines murder with innocence. Identify a device in each and explain its effect. [4 marks]

1. The dancing years are personification, because time receives human movement. Their frenzied dance makes the imagined future seem dangerously uncontrolled.
2. The daughter becoming a tree is metaphor, presenting her life through an image of organic growth and stability.
3. The thoughts being like a linnet form a simile, explicitly comparing her mental life with a bird’s generous song.
4. The combination of murder and innocence is oxymoron, bringing contradictory ideas together to suggest destructive power without conscious guilt.

Q7. The final wish places the daughter with a bridegroom in a house governed by custom and ceremony. It contrasts that house with streets trading arrogance and hatred, links ceremony to the earlier horn of gifts that could be wasted, and links custom to the earlier image of a spreading laurel. Explain the ending in five points. [5 marks]

1. The bridegroom and house locate the father’s final hope within an imagined married life; this remains a wish rather than an event already completed.
2. Custom and ceremony represent established practices and formal observances. The father sees them as supports for an ordered, sustaining household.
3. The public streets provide a hostile contrast, making arrogance and hatred appear like goods in circulation beyond the desired domestic shelter.
4. The abundant horn associates ceremony with valuable gifts and generosity. Its return gathers the earlier concern about wasted advantages into the final vision.
5. The spreading laurel associates custom with rooted growth. The ending therefore joins social order, belonging and vitality within the future the father imagines.

Q8. The father wants generous thoughts and lasting happiness for his daughter, but also wishes her rooted in one place, hostile to opinions, and settled in a ceremonious marriage. Her own response is not heard. Offer a balanced three-point reading of his hopes. [3 marks]

1. His desire for generosity and happiness expresses care: he wants her inner life and relationships to survive the difficulties that he fears.
2. The specified place, attitude towards opinions and marriage also restrict the range of possibilities he imagines for her, creating tension between protection and independent choice.
3. Because the daughter does not answer, these wishes remain the father’s vision. A balanced reading can recognise their affection while questioning their limits.

Key takeaways

• The father’s prayer develops from immediate anxiety during a storm into hopes about his sleeping daughter’s adult character and relationships.
• He desires beauty in moderation, while placing greater trust in natural kindness, courtesy and the affection earned through considerate conduct.
• The ten eight-line stanzas organise changing reflections through an underlying AABBCDDC rhyme pattern, with some partial sound correspondences.
• The linnet, tree and laurel connect generous expression with healthy growth, rooted belonging and resistance to inward hatred.
• The soul’s recovered innocence means freedom from hatred at its deepest root, rather than simple ignorance of difficulty.
• The father imagines happiness despite continuing hostility; he does not promise a future in which every external danger disappears.
• Custom and ceremony provide the final household ideal, although the prayer leaves room to question the restrictions within that ideal.
• Preserve maybe, may well and can when explaining the poem, and distinguish the speaker’s hopes from established events.

Test yourself

Who speaks, and what is the daughter doing at the beginning?

The father speaks while his daughter sleeps beneath a cradle hood and covering during a storm.

What two obstacles against the Atlantic wind are named?

Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill are the two obstacles mentioned against the destructive Atlantic wind.

Why is the word maybe significant in the discussion of beauty?

It qualifies the possible loss of heart-revealing intimacy, so an explanation should not turn that possibility into certainty.

What does the linnet suggest about the thoughts the father wishes for?

Its freely shared song suggests thoughts marked by generosity, cheerfulness and a welcome influence on others.

What is the difference between the daughter as a tree and her thoughts like a linnet?

The tree is a metaphor identifying her with another thing; the linnet comparison is a simile made explicit through like.

What condition precedes the soul’s recovery of radical innocence?

Hatred must be driven away before the soul recovers innocence at its deepest root.

Why does the final laurel matter beyond its literal identity?

It links custom with rooted, continuing growth and recalls the earlier wish for secure belonging.

How can the ending express both love and limitation?

The father seeks security and happiness, but imagines them within a prescribed place, attitude and form of married life.