A Prayer for My Daughter its "metremes", or rhymical motifs, rather than common metrical devices. The poem also may be read to consist of straightforward iambic verse that relies on common metrical devices such as elision, acephalous lines, promotion, and metrical inversion. Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 of each stanza are iambic pentameter; lines 4, 6, and 7 are iambic tetrameter. For instance, using traditional principles of scansion, stanza two may be scanned as shown below, where syllables in all caps represent metrical beats, lower-case syllables represent metrical off-beats, the vertical bar represents the termination of a metrical foot, and apostrophes represent elisions.
Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day five and nine, as well as the erasures before "sunshine" and "above" suggest that the poem was written hastily. One interpretation by Winidred Gerin says that in the poem "emotion and expression have achieved a fusion as felicitous as it is rare in Brontë's writing, is probably the best poem she ever wrote, though not the most characteristic". The poem is based upon an actual experience of Brontë's. A note stating "Composed in the Long-Plantation on a wild bright windy day", was written in Anne Brontë's hand at the bottom of the manuscript and the "Long-Plantation" was identified by Edward