Key Facts

• Poet: William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
• Original Title: The Stolen Child
• Written Time: 1886 (early period of Yeats’s writing career)
• First Published: 1886, in The Irish Monthly. Later included in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
• Form: Ballad-style Lyric Poem
• Genre: Romantic, Mythical, and Symbolic Poetry
• Tone: Dreamlike, Melancholic, Enchanting, and Mournful
• Rhyme Scheme: ABABCDCD (with a repeating refrain)
• Meter: Mostly Iambic Tetrameter and Iambic Trimester
• Point of View: Third Person (narrated through the voices of the fairies)
• Summary in a Line: Fairies tempt a human child to leave the sorrowful human world and join their magical land of eternal beauty.
• Total Lines: 48
• Total Stanzas: 4
• Setting:

• Time Setting: Mythical Ireland (inspired by ancient Celtic folklore)
• Place Setting: Irish landscapes like Sleuth Wood, Rosses, and Glen-Car. They blend real Irish nature with the fantasy world of the fairies.