Poetry: The Stolen Child

Overview
William Butler Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” (1889) channels Irish folklore to tell a haunting, lyrical story about a child enticed away from the human world by faeries. The poem’s heart lies in the tension between enchantment and loss: the faeries promise refuge “to the waters and the wild,” claiming the human world is “more full of weeping than you can understand,” yet what they offer requires the child’s permanent separation from home and ordinary joys. Its music, refrains, and lush imagery situate the poem in the Celtic Revival, while the narrative remains intimate, almost lullaby-like, with a dark undertow.

Structure and Narrative
The poem unfolds in four stanzas. In the first three, a chorus of faery voices paints their nocturnal domains and rituals, inviting a “human child” to escape with them. Each of these stanzas culminates in the refrain, “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild,” underscoring the relentless pull of the otherworld. The final stanza shifts focus to the domestic sphere the child will abandon, setting the faeries’ ethereal promises against the tactile comforts of home and the quiet pulse of rural life.

Across the stanzas, movement intensifies from enticing description to decisive departure. What begins as atmospheric beckoning becomes an irrevocable crossing: the faeries do not merely play; they steal.

Imagery and Setting
Yeats anchors the faeries’ realm in real Irish locales, Sleuth Wood, the Rosses, and Glencar, transfigured by moonlit water, “olden dances,” and whispering streams. The images are tactile and gleaming: a “leafy island” where herons stir and “reddest stolen cherries” fill hidden vats; dim gray sands glossed by moonlight; foamy bubbles chased at the water’s edge; and mountain streams where slumbering trout are brushed into uneasy dreams. Nature seems alive with murmurs and motion, inviting the child into a world of perpetual play and shimmering secrecy.

By contrast, the human world is domestic and steady. Yeats sketches hearth and pantry, the kettle on the hob, the brown mice around the oatmeal chest, the lowing of calves on a warm hillside. These images are humble but consoling, weighted with everyday peace and familial presence. The juxtaposition heightens the pathos: the magic of the wild is beautiful, but leaving means forfeiting this intimate, sustaining world.

Themes
The core theme is seduction versus solace. The faeries pose enchantment as mercy: escape from a sorrow-drenched world. Yet their tenderness conceals abduction; they soothe even as they sever. Yeats explores the allure of escape, art, dream, and myth, set against the obligations and quiet graces of ordinary life. Innocence is central: the “solemn-eyed” child cannot grasp the cost of departure, just as the refrain itself sweetens what is ultimately a wrenching theft.

There is also a meditation on perception: the faery world magnifies beauty and movement, while the human world offers rhythm and rest. The poem asks whether wonder must be bought with loss, and whether the balm of fantasy can justify the grief it causes.

Ending and Ambiguity
The final stanza crystallizes the paradox. The faeries lead the child “hand in hand,” while the kettle’s song, the mice’s scurry, and the cattle’s lowing fade from a life the child will no longer share. The refrain’s claim about a world “full of weeping” resonates doubly: it explains the flight, yet anticipates the sorrow left behind. The closing image is tender and chilling at once, leaving the reader unsure whether rescue or ravishment has occurred, and whether the waters and the wild offer comfort or a beautiful exile.