The Stolen Child

THE STOLEN CHILD

 by W.B. Yeats

 

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 faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray 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 anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, 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 whispering 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 faery, 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.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

 

I can’t wait to discuss this poem in my upcoming Teen Poets workshop. Yeats uses rhyme and meter to emphasize a child’s world – the Fairy Realm – and the way the musicality of the refrain underscores this inaccessible, faraway place. “Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand/For the world’s more full of weepin than you can understand.” The particulars of the poem – the “rocky highland,” the “leafy island,” the “flapping herons” which wake the “drowsy water rats” to me suggest a sleepy otherworld. “The Stolen Child” gets really interesting in lines 23-24: “While the world is full of troubles/And is anxious in its sleep.” Here, through juxtaposition and the repeated use of words like “sleep” and “drowsy” and “unquiet dreams” he suggests that perhaps we are asleep in this world as well. Yeats’ choice of place names – the “Slueth Wood,” the “Rosses.” “Glen Car” are all (at least to my ears) ancient sounding and alluring, drawing you in through sound almost as a lullaby does. The irony lies in what the lullaby conceals – the pain of being human, the subtext of the phenomenal world from which the child is being lured.  Everything I love about Yeats converges in this poem, even his fixation on the body as the locus of all human suffering.

As little as Yeats and Sendak could possibly have to do with each other, “The Stolen Child” makes me think of Sendak’s work, in particular the associations of childhood with the palpable threat of predation and abduction that appear in Outside Over There and We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy.

Read Full Post »

as pitiless as the sun…

THE SECOND COMING
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“The Second Coming” is one of my favorites of Yeats’ poems. Even before I read a few of the endless theories about Yeats’ interest in the occult and paganism, historical cycles, what he calls the “dissolution of civilization” – in the first lines of the poem (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconers/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”) I’m immediately drawn into a frenzied space and time. In the repetition of the word “falcon” in “falconer” some parallel relationship is implied; but the connective words “cannot hear” signify the impending and dangerous imbalance between the two, between man and his civilized world, which I think is a theme that runs throughout the poem. The poem itself has a sort of spiraling energy with the shape of the “lion body and the head of the man” taking form out of an expanse of desert, and the “shadows of the indignant desert birds” that “reel” about the beast’s “slow thighs.”

I read many speculations about whether the “Second Coming” implies a reversion or an apocalypse, or if the cycles in the poem are oscillations between Christianity and paganism. I think the poem leaves the possibilities much more open-ended – perhaps the Second Coming will be a new way of thinking all together, one not mapped out on the same temporal (historical) vectors. One can only hope.

Read Full Post »