A Prayer for My Daughter was written in 1919 after the birth of his first child named Anne Butler Yeats. This date is quite significant because it was soon after the First World War. Naturally, W.B. Yeats was troubled and horrified about the postwar situation in the western world. There was change, chaos and turbulence in the society, and the world was becoming harsher and a coarse place to live in.
The poem was written in 1930 after a lapse of about four years from the date of his writing the poem entitled Sailing to Byzantium. Byzantium is apparently a sequel to the Sailing to Byzantium. In the interval between 'Sailing to Byzantium' and the present poem, the poet had further developed intellectually. Byzantium, therefore, is naturally an improvement upon the earlier composition, Sailing to Byzantium.
Yeats wrote the poem Byzantium after the poem Sailing to Byzantium, apparently dissatisfied (it is said someone pointed out its drawbacks) by the former poem: The first poem's title includes 'sailing to' but the poet presents himself as already (and easily) reaching there!
The theme of immortality in Yeats's Byzantium poems is explored in the pair poems, "Byzantium" and "Sailing to Byzantium." Both these 'poems seem to express a desire to escape from the decay and tedium of cyclical nature. On a wholly spiritual level, "Byzantium" clearly does contrast the mere mundane level of daylight vision with the infinitely richer possibilities that contemplations of the eternal and the miraculous offer.
Yeats’s picture of old age is expressed beautifully in “Sailing to Byzanytium.” In the first stanza, Yeats speaks of a place that is “no country for old men.” In this country, the young, along with “fish, flesh, or fowl” engage in the procreative, generative energy of summer. Caught up in “sensual music,” the inhabitants of this country do not consider intellectual or spiritual concerns. Rather, they are caught up in life itself, not considering that which is eternal.
The title “Sailing to Byzantium” suggests an escape to a distant, imaginary land where the speaker achieves mystical union with beautiful, eternal works of art. Byzantium is the old name of Constantinople or Istanbul, which was the capital of the Eastern section of the Roman Empire. It was famous for its mosaic art and metal enameling.
Ted Hughes' poetic style is original and he is influenced by Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath. His usual tendency is to use tough vocabulary and put words together in an unusual combination.
Ted Hughes in his poem 'Pike' strikingly depicts the violence of human world by simply projecting the natural world of pike. The overall structure of the poem is simple, but with that simplicity he powerfully shows the complex relation of natural and human world.
Pike is a poem depicting violence which is recurring theme in Hughes' poetry. Pike is just three inches long fish. Its color is a blending of green and yellow. Pike is a killer of its own species from its very birth onwards. Even a newly-born pike has an ancient, spiteful grin. The pike seems to be dancing on the surface of the water with the flies hovering around them.
This beginning of the poem suggests that its setting is one of an evening. The speaker can see the cars stopped beyond the window. He seems to be an inhabitant of the place, an outsider who looks at things with a detachment and a critical attitude.