they take my kindness for weakness still comin out strong

The poem follows a metrical structure that alternates between “ iambic pentameter” and “ trochaic pentameter”. Each stanza follows a regular rhyme scheme of “AABBCDDC”. The stanza form is the same as employed by him in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. The poem ‘ A Prayer for My Daughter’ is written in the lyric form containing ten eight-line stanzas. Finally, he wants her to get married into an aristocratic family which is rooted in spirituality and traditional values. He further wants her to be well-mannered and full of humility free from intellectual hatred and being strongly opinionated. He wants to give his daughter a life of beauty and innocence, safety, and security. The poem not only expresses the helplessness of Yeats as a father but all fathers who had to walk through this situation.

So, he ponders how she will survive the difficult times ahead, in the politically turbulent times.

Though by 1919, the war was over, in Ireland it yet turned normal. Yeats in his ten- stanza poem, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ questions how best to raise his daughter.

They take my kindness for weakness still comin out strong