The Stolen Child is a poem written by William Butler Yeats when he was 21. It is a fairy tale and reveals his love for Irish myths, mysticism, and romantic fairy stories.
We are very eager to hear from our fellow Poetry Covers! Please think about submitting and contributing an article or two to the Poetry Cove's Magazine over HERE. Also, personally, I'd love to actually hear the voice behind many of your poems- remember you can submit your poetry recordings to the Poetry Cove Radio HERE.
Table of Contents
William Butler Yeats- An Introduction
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865-28 January 1939) is arguably the most renowned, revered, and respected poet of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Yeats was a playwright, prose writer, and poet. Growing up in Sandymount, an affluent coastal area of Dublin, Yeats was intrigued by Irish legends and the occult.
He explored poetry from a young age. As Yeats grew older his interests became increasingly political, and his famous The Second Coming is evident of his maturity as a poet.
Yeats firmly upheld his Irish roots, even though he lived in London during his youth. He endeavoured to revive Irish literature, in the mainstream culture. His companion John O'Leary reintroduced and renewed his acquaintance with Irish literature in England, especially the Celtic sagas.
As a student at Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art, he published his first works during the 1880s. At age 19 in the Dublin University Review, he published Mosada: A Dramatic Poem, and in 1889 he published his epic poem The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems his first collection in London.
To the Waters and The Wild
The Stolen Child was written in 1886 and published in Crossways in 1889 and then 1896 in the Irish monthly. Yeats was 21 when he published this poem.
The Stolen Child is comprised of four stanzas and is a reverie of his homeland Ireland and the spirited fae- that occupied the stories and mythology secreted away and harvested in Yeats's imagination.
Yeats was captivated with Irish fairy tales and published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888, and Fairy Folk Tales of Ireland in 1892.
The poem wreathes themes of freedom and fantasy with shadowed, clandestine beings, who are deeply invested in the reader-child. It is a short delightful poem that has captured the hearts of many children, yet the underlying eerieness is hard to deny.
The deep, darker undercurrent of kidnapping human children, is allayed by the sweet, short, chantlike sentences and enchanting imagery.
Celtic mythology has fables of a collection of fairies that steal and wisp away children. Some replace children with fae changelings.
There is a promised sanctuary where innocence and the unhindered self can return to the untempered wilderness.
However, the constant return to the repeated sentence "For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." is a hint full of menacing promise.
This juxtaposition maintains the poem's capacity for enduring storytelling. Each sentence is structured in simple-word symmetry. This enhances the beguiling nature of the read.
The Stolen Child's rhyming scheme is a basic ABAB CDCD EFEF and deviates to AABB (settling each stanza of the piece)- this highlights the elementary read and the audience it's meant for.
The poem draws inspiration from the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. Both movements position that the beauty inherent to nature informs the highest virtue that one's conscious mind can aspire to.
In The Stolen Child, there is a duality to the form of the piece. Duality in nature, duality in fantasy, duality in the real world. It explores the duality in desire/regret, duality in innocence/malevolence, duality in loss/found.
Duality offers an interesting dimension to the poetry. It's a tragic beauty that something can't exist without its opposite. Emotions interlaced by laws of duality are deeply felt in our human experience.
Poetry structured on duality calls to our own knowing the contrast in beauty and melancholic loss.
When two opposing forces intertwine, the reach of one exceeds the other. The outcome is a multifaceted instance, that reveals itself in intricate design and unexpected destination.
Destination and Transformation
The final stanza confirms that the fairy folk has the human child, their enticing dance with rhythm and words worked.
The journey with the fae has been pleasant and rich with delights and promise, yet, as the human child finds himself far removed from the familiarity of the home there remain doubts as to the intent of the fairies.
What do you think reader? Is the human child in the palace of endless innocence, rampant wilderness, and continued delight?
Or is the fate of the human child dark, terrible and cruel? Duality weaves inevitable transformation- What then could the outcome be for this child-human? Please let me know in the comment section below.