Inspiration:

Before leaving UK Edel and I took Grace to Bradford on Avon. The purpose was to introduce her to friends and associates there, as well as to say au revoir to people who might come visit us in Cork.

The Swan Hotel had no where free from smoke. I mention this because one of the best things about moving to Ireland is that you can take an infant into a pub without feeling that you are shortening her life.

Dai Griffiths and Dave Mosely both refered to Yeats poem about his daughter. I’d never heard of this poem.

On the day Grace(31.08.05) was born I wrote a poem. So since then I’ve been meaning to look up Yeats’ collected works. My copy is still in the loft in Bath. It’ll follow us to Cork after we sell that house.

Last night I found it…

I found Yeats and a controversy on a website. Is this a great poem or a trite bit of woman hating envy? (That’s the row. I haven’t had time to take sides.)

See what you think. After Yeats, you’ll find my short celebration, called Grace.

A Prayer For My Daughter

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-leggèd 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 kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
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 it 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 bellows 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.

— William Butler Yeats

Grace

She comes like a ray of sunlight
Breaking through a storm in the mountains.
Floods into arms
Treasure formed by the gods of beauty.
Loosed from her umbilical cord
She flips open a pair of dark blue eyes
That go to work at once
Soaking in joy that pours
From mother’s face,
Touching heat from the skin
Of a woman who has climbed
The peak of the world’s longest range.
The arrival of a magician,
Able to transform an exhausted and pained visage
Into a light infused patina
Intoxicated with joy.

— Paul Hugh O’Mahony