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.
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.
William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s most famous and beloved poet of the 20th century, was intrigued by the Celtic myths and legends of his homeland, a fascination instilled at an early age by his mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen Yeats. His early poem, “The Stolen Child”, first appeared in the Irish Monthly in December 1886, and was published in 1892 in his first book of poetry, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, as well as Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry.
The poem tells of a mortal child who is lured away to the land of the fairies, far from the troubles and sadness of the human world. It is a romantic metaphor for the universal loss of innocence we all go through as we wrestle with the random, unjust and tragic nature of life, and perhaps a personal expression of Yeats own reckoning with sorrow in his life. Just twenty one years old at the time he wrote the poem, Yeats surely thought of his younger siblings, Robert and Jane, who both died at a young age-Robert at age three and Jane at just a year old.
The places mentioned in the poem are located in Sligo and Leitrim, in the storied west of Ireland, where Yeats spent much of his youth. A wild and beautiful land, steeped in the mystery, superstition and magic of Irish mythology, western Ireland in the late 19th century must have seemed to Yeats very much the land of the aos sí, (ees shee), the people of the mounds. Common to both Irish and Scottish mythology, the ancient race of the aos sí are also known as the daoine sídhe (dee-nuh shee-uh[th]) and, later in Irish literature, as the Tuatha Dé Danann (two-uh-huh day dan-in).
