Reading Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ in Light of Lev Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Learning

Abstract

In this research paper, the authors discuss W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ through the sociocultural theory of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. The Vygotskian approach in the fields of education and psychology emphasises the interdependence of social and cognitive processes in child development and education. Utilising a few of the main concepts of the Vygotskian sociological framework such as mediation, scaffolding, the zone of proximal development, and internalization, the paper critically examines Yeats’s ‘A Prayer’, with the objective of shedding new light on its meaning and interpretation. The paper argues that there are notable parallels and similarities between the main concepts in Vygotsky’s theory and the implicit notions and precepts of child learning and development inherent in Yeats’s poem, which provides a common ground between the theorist and the poet.