Parenting & Family Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats opens a trapdoor in the floorboards of ordinary life and invites you to fall through. The lullaby cadence of "Come away" sounds tender, even protective, but the persuasion is doing something sharper: it reframes escape as mercy. Calling the listener "O human child" places the speaker on the far side of the species line, where sympathy can shade into condescension. The fairy’s offer is intimacy ("hand in hand") with a price tag: leaving the human world behind.

The line works because it weaponizes contrast. "Waters and the wild" is pure sensory release, an elemental alternative to social reality, while "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand" lands like a quiet indictment. Yeats isn’t merely lamenting sadness; he’s pointing to a scale of suffering too vast for innocence to metabolize. The child can’t "understand", not because they’re foolish, but because comprehension itself becomes contamination. The fairy promises protection from knowledge.

Context matters: this is early Yeats, steeped in Celtic folklore and the Irish Literary Revival, when myth wasn’t just decorative but political and psychological. The fairyland isn’t a Disney refuge; it’s an ambivalent elsewhere that can mean death, exile, or art. Yeats is also staging a familiar modern pressure: the temptation to opt out. The seduction of retreat feels especially pointed in a world where adult life is presented as grief management. The beauty of the invitation is inseparable from its danger: it makes withdrawal sound like love.