Subject: ADD: Stolen Child (W.B. Yeats)
From:
MartinRyan
Date: 06 Mar 01 - 04:49 AM
There you go! Regards
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our fairy vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand. Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand. | Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whisper in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand. Away with us he's going.
The solemn-eyed;
He´ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand. ~ W.B. Yeats ~ |
In this poem, Yeats confronts natural life with a super-natural life of fairies which is less desirable. Of course, the "Natural World" is not ideal - it is a world of sorrow and weeping - , and yet, the sad tone of the poem becomes more intense in the fourth stanza when the child leaves this real world together with the fairies ("away with us he´s going"). Suddenly, it is the rural ("calves on the warm hillside"), domestic ("kettle on the hob") and daily world that could have brought peace to the child ("sing peace into his breast"). The child will not find peace in this temptingly described world of the fairies. The water between Yeats's antithetic worlds contains an empire of fairies ("Zwischen-Reich"). This empire
is described by Yeats in stanzas one to three. In the chorus, the fairyland is called a "water-world" ("Come away ... to the waters"). Here, in Yeats's lyric poetry as well as in Irish folklore, by which Yeats was influenced, fairies are the seducers of the mortal ("Come away": They want to "steal" the human child and they will not not fail. The child will be stolen as it is mentioned in the title). In order to reach their aim, the fairies apparently offer the values of the immortal world. In "The Stolen Child" the promised joy of the fairyland is the departure from the "world of weeping", the natural world, the world of the mortal. But the poetic representation of the fairies in the lyric poetry of William Butler Yeats clearly shows that the fairies' water-world does not keep what it promises (cf. last stanza). (Harald Münster, LKE)
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