Summary
Hatred born from intellectual opinions is especially odious, the speaker says, and so he hopes that his daughter will come to distrust opinion on principle. Just as beautiful women often squander all the abundance they have been given, women with strong opinions do the same. They end up with blustering, difficult men. When hatred is absent, a person's soul becomes radically self-sufficient, capable of entertaining, frightening, and soothing itself. Thus the soul enters into a kind of harmony with heaven itself, so that unhappy circumstances—including blustering and difficult men—aren't able to upset its equilibrium or destroy its happiness.
The prayer ends with the speaker hoping that his daughter's husband will bring her to a home oriented around custom and ceremony—a place where tradition and routine are treated reverently. Outside in the streets, arrogance and hatred are the norms, but inside, custom and ceremony will give way to true beauty and true innocence. After all, "ceremony" is merely another name for the "horn of plenty"—for abundance. "Custom," meanwhile, is another name for the laurel tree that the speaker hopes his daughter will one day resemble.
Analysis
One of the striking elements of this poem is the way that it seems to both endorse and critique traditional notions of femininity. The speaker advises his daughter to be kind, charming, beautiful (but only within certain parameters), and nurturing—partly in the service of attracting worthwhile men. The poem ends not only with a nod to the daughter's future marriage, but also with a seeming endorsement of the domestic (and traditionally female) space over the traditionally male public space. At the same time, the speaker nods toward the restrictiveness of gendered roles in marriage and elsewhere, approaching the issue with what at times can look simply like pragmatism. He notes that very beautiful and very opinionated women tend to be unhappy because of the men who surround them, subtly taking note of the way that men's will can dictate women's lives in extreme ways. Still, the speaker's advice is far from a condemnation of gender roles—it is, if anything, a collection of maxims about how to navigate this system successfully.
In fact, the speaker can often appear almost conflicted about the advice he offers. He frequently shifts topics, as if feeling a sense of urgency as he prays, and as if continually conceiving of new hopes and fears for his daughter, and new ways to express those feelings. These shifts are often reflected in the work's rhyme scheme. Each stanza follows an AABBCDDC rhyme scheme, essentially splitting the stanza into two equal sections. This allows the complexity of the speaker's thoughts to play out in the poem's structure. For instance, the final stanza consists first of a kind of benediction—the speaker's hope that his daughter will be brought into a house full of custom and ceremony—followed by an explanation or justification, in which the speaker explains why custom and ceremony are important. These are clearly related topics, and so they fit well into the same long, eight-line stanza. However, because they approach a topic from two different perspectives, the divide created by the change in rhyme halfway through the stanza helps organize and separate the topics.
