Mar

18

Come Away, O Human Child…

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 18, 2008 |

Few poets are as synonymous with national identity as William Butler Yeats of Ireland. Here’s one of his most famous and most loved poems:

The Stolen Child

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 berries
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 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 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 to 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,
from a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

I was familiar with this poem even before I read it in a college English class where the professor insisted it was about a child drowning. That was news to me. I’d always taken the poem at face value and assumed it was about, well, faeries stealing a child. If I’d looked for any deeper meaning I might have thought it was about Yeats saying farewell to his own childhood. The poem was included in Yeats’s first book, The Wanderings of Oisin And Other Poems, published in 1889 when he was twenty-four. The assumption that a poem must mean something other than what it says can be frustrating and even intimidating for readers. Sure, metaphor is an important tool, and many poems are metaphors, but I think the idea that poems have to be dissected, that, to be fully understood, readers have to put a poem in their own words, turns people off. One of my high school English teachers used to have us read poems and then she’d tell us we weren’t educated enough to understand what the poems meant. If we couldn’t understand them what was the point of reading them? I just enjoy many of Yeats’s poems, and many other poems besides, without worrying about whether I’m missing some deep, mystical, hidden meaning. Sometimes there are hidden depths, things I discover only after several re-readings. The point is, if I didn’t enjoy the poems to begin with, I’d never find those depths, and if I find that the poem means only what it says, that doesn’t diminish it.

Here’s Loreena McKennitt’s musical adaptation of The Stolen Child:


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Marie on July 18, 2008 2:25 pm

    O my God… I cried when I finished reading the poem… I had heard the “Come away o human child…” part in a Torchwood episode about faeries, and I’m sure I had heard it before… But until I found this poem did I understood… It’s beautiful, it gets to the deepest aprt of the human soul, somehow, just this simple little poem does. No matter if it has a deeper meaning, no matter if you have to re-read it, teachers forget that poems are meant to be felt, no understood…

    Marie.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

<< Post Navigation >>

« « Book ‘Em: Origins And Traditions. | Encyclopedic Knowledge. » »