A Prayer for My Daughter

“A Prayer for my Daughter” can be considered a variation on the Italian ottava rima form because of Yeats’seight-line stanzas. Sir Thomas Wyatt (who also popularized the Italian sonnet in English in the early English Renaissance) introduced this form of eight-line stanzas with 11-syllable lines to English poetry. Lord Byron (George Gordon) used a 10-syllable variation in Don Juan.

Unlike the classic ottava rima form of 11-syllable lines—which Yeats uses in “Among School Children”—the lines of “A Prayer for my Daughter” are iambic pentameter (Lines1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 of each stanza) or iambic tetrameter (Lines 4, 6, and 7 of each stanza). Scholars such as Robert Einarsson argue the meter can be read in rhythmical motifs rather than using standard metrical devices.

Yeats also deviates from the classic ottava rima rhyme scheme in “A Prayer for my Daughter.” Again, his poem “Among School Children” follows the classic ABABABCC rhyme scheme, but “A Prayer for my Daughter” follows a AABBCDDC scheme: two rhyming couplets and a quatrain of enclosed rhyme in each stanza. However, in both poems, Yeats uses slant rhyme.