ABSTRACT
In this essay I read ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (written 1919, published 1921) as a reverie on the self – the individual self, but also, more importantly, the Self in the sense of universal spirit, as Yeats used the term in his and Purohit Swami’s translation of the ancient Indian philosophical texts, the Upanishads. In ‘A Prayer’ Yeats invokes cross-cultural tropes, such as the tree and the bird, to bring the Upanishadic understanding of the self into relation with everyday life. I argue that reading ‘self’ in the poem to refer only to the individual ego, and ignoring other philosophical resonances of the term, has resulted in misreading the poem as narrowly personal and politically conservative.
