A Prayer for My Daughter
Outside another storm is howling . . . That is the opening phrase of “A Prayer for My Daughters,” the closing poem of my first book of poems, What Really Matters. Obviously, both the phrase and the poem’s title make a deep bow toward W. B. Yeats’s magisterial poem “A Prayer for My Daughter,” written on the occasion of the birth of his first child and only daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, in 1919:
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on.
The phrase came to me, however, not in a premeditated sidling up to a great precursor poet — un vers calculé in Paul Valéry’s parlance — but as a gift — un vers donné — as I watched, transfixed, the first night of Operation Desert Storm, that “made-for-television war,” flicker and flash across the screen in January of 1991. Settled into a La-Z-Boy recliner with a three-year-old daughter snuggled into my lap for an umpteenth reading of Goodnight, Moon or Miss Rumphius and a seven-month-old sleeping on my shoulder, I felt an entire poem begin to percolate in my brain in our comfortable south-of-Boston suburban home while half a world away Iraq and Kuwait — indeed, the whole of the Persian Gulf — seemed to explode right before my eyes.
As it turns out, the poem took me months to complete. Committing from the outset to ottava rima — an eight-line stanza with a fixed rhyme scheme (abababcc) that I had never attempted before — I was slowed down by both the rigors of the form and the weight of the theme I wanted the poem to carry: issues of faith and doubt in the face of what looked like the apocalypse. Ironically, I thought I was being true to Yeats, who deploys ottava rima in such iconic poems as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” I was well into the second stanza of my poem — too late to turn back! — before I discovered that his original deploys a different eight-line rhyme scheme: aabbcddc. By the time I finished “A Prayer for My Daughters,” a third daughter — born in October of 1991 — had joined the mix. Suddenly outnumbered, my wife and I had our hands full, and my poem was thus that much more full of the heartfelt import that, I hope, still transcends the moment that prompted it.
Perhaps inevitably, I recently turned to that poem — to its apocalyptic prompt — as I became once again an eyewitness-from-afar to a military bombardment of unimaginable magnitude: the ruthless Russian attack on Ukraine in late February of 2022. But this time the distance was considerably foreshortened, and the explosions hit not figuratively but literally close to home, as the primary lens through which I viewed this war was the in-the-moment reporting of both horrors and heroism by that third-born daughter, now a newspaper journalist with the venerable Washington Post.
Siobhán arrived in Kyiv a couple of days before the war started. As I jot these thoughts, she has just finished her first assignment there, which lasted almost seven weeks. During that time she authored or co-authored upwards of forty pieces, many of them front-page stories in the Post, and contributed to a number of video reports and podcasts as well. Along with much of the wider world, I watched — in my case specifically through her eyes and her words — the situation in Ukraine turn from grim to dire to desperate to horrific to unspeakable and unthinkable. Focused less on the political and the military aspects of the war, and much more on the human toll of the Russian military’s scorched-earth attack on the people of Ukraine, and on the determination and resilience of its people, Siobhán’s stories, individually and collectively, left me and leave me deeply rattled.
And, unlike with that long-ago Gulf War, I was left also at a loss for words, though not on the thick-witted principle that Yeats articulated in defense of his decision to exclude war poems from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935: “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.” (Incidentally, Yeats has also been roundly taken to task by scholars and critics for his patronizing attitude toward women expressed at various points in “A Prayer for My Daughter.”) Indeed, countering Yeats, I am not alone in subscribing to the much more inclusive principle that British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen, killed on the Western Front in the final week of the Great War of 1914-18, inscribed famously in the preface he drafted for his posthumously published Poems (1920):
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
But I was simply tongue-tied by all that my daughter’s reporting was bearing witness to.
And, frankly, I was struck dumb as well by the all-consuming worries that any parent with a child in a high-risk situation might have. Siobhán had reported from war zones in the past — from Yemen, from Afghanistan, from South Sudan, from Cameroon . . . But those were short-term forays that my wife and I didn’t really know much about until her stories appeared in print. Her assignment to Kyiv was not only more open-ended but also potentially far more dangerous in so many ways given Vladimir Putin’s reputation for calculated cold-bloodedness and the seemingly unlimited weaponry of the Russian military at his disposal.
Of course, we were profoundly proud of the utterly crucial work that Siobhán was contributing under the banner — Democracy Dies in Darkness — of the Washington Post, often in collaboration with other members of the newspaper’s remarkable reporting team, including her steadfast Ukrainian fixer/local reporting partner Kostiantyn Khudov, seasoned international reporter Sudarsan Raghavan, brilliant photographer Heidi Levine and intrepid video journalist Whitney Shefte. But we were also profoundly disquieted, and so, premised on our knowing that our daughter’s typical schedule had her scouring the streets and the neighborhoods of Kyiv for stories during the day then bunkering down in the relative safety of a hotel basement at night, my wife and I developed a strategy for managing our worry. There’s a seven-hour time difference between here and Kyiv. There was a 5:00 p.m. curfew, which is 10:00 a.m. here. Thus, if we were able to sleep through the night until 6:00 a.m., we had only four waking hours of knowing that Siobhán was out on the streets. If, however, we woke up at 4:00 a.m. — which happened more than once — that was a different story . . . and part of that story involves a poem with an incidental connection to Yeats.
Written by Winifred M. Letts, “Prayer for a Little Child” was initially published in her first volume of poems, Songs from Leinster (1913). A minor though prolific figure — poet, playwright, novelist — of the Irish literary revival of the first few decades of the twentieth century, Letts was popular in her moment, and eventually “Prayer for a Little Child” was produced as a broadside by the Cuala Press, a printing enterprise founded in 1908 by Elizabeth “Lolly” Yeats, the poet’s sister, with financial backing from her brother. The poem was complemented by a hand-colored Arts and Crafts-influenced illustration by Beatrice Campbell (neé Elvery), a.k.a. Lady Glenavy. Back in 1987 my parents gave us a copy of this broadside (a reissue, but also hand-colored) when we were expecting our first child, and we have had it hanging prominently in our several homes ever since.
Cut out of the same folksy cloth that determined a lot of Irish poetry of the revival period, “Prayer for a Little Child” sings, from its opening lines, with unlabored emotion:
God keep my jewel this day from danger
From tinker and pooka and black-hearted stranger
From harm of the water and hurt of the fire
From the horns of the cows going home to the byre
Tonally — as well as formally and stylistically — the contrast with Yeats’s highly cerebral “prayer” for his newborn child written a few years later is stark. Perhaps needless to say, Letts’s poem was probably not what Yeats had in mind when he wrote, in “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” the opening poem of his first volume of poems, Crossways (1889), that “Words alone are certain good.”
In the final stanza of “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Yeats projects his infant grown into a woman decades hence:
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.
And yet, are the “words” of “Prayer for a Little Child” — the unembarrassed prayerfulness and the bucolic tropes and the concern for the child’s immediate wellbeing — any less inviting to the reader than Yeats’s sober intoning? In her Introduction to The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Professor Helen Vendler proposes that “the private literary genres — such as the Psalms, or prayers printed in prayer books, or secular lyrics — are scripted for repeated personal recitation.” The closing couplet of Letts’s poem reads:
From cut & from tumble—from sickness & weeping
MAY GOD have my jewel this day in his keeping.
Who hits closer to the crux of the matter — Yeats or Letts?
Yes, more than a century after its composing, current literary sensibilities may find Letts’s poem quaint or trite or saccharine. But with our daughter based in the heart of the besieged capital of Kyiv during her seemingly endless deployment in war-ravaged Ukraine, my wife and I took comfort from that broadside hanging on our wall as we passed by it many times each day. If not in its literal words then at least in its earnest spirit, it was for each of us truly a prayer for my daughter.
UPDATE: Siobhán returned to Ukraine for another harrowing four weeks in May and June, this time including embeds with a Ukrainian battalion in the Donbas region with a reporting team that included Anastacia Galouchka, Ievgeniia Sivorka, Serhii Korolchuk and Paul Sonne (in D.C.) as well as photographer Heidi Levine. As I update this essay in late September, she has just completed another three weeks spent mostly in Kharkiv and Izyum; on this tour of duty she collaborated with Anastacia Galouchka, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Steve Hendrix, Robyn Dixon, Mary Ilyushina, Sergii Mukaieliants, video journalist Whitney Shefte, and photographer Wojciech Grzedzinski.
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He retired in December of 2019 after 35½ years as Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. His articles, essays, and reviews on literary and cultural matters have been published in a wide variety of scholarly journals and general-interest magazines, and his poems and short fiction have been published in literary journals and magazines on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border and on both sides of the Atlantic. His two books of poems — What Really Matters and Delivering the News — were published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.