The Stolen Child

Poetry | William Butler Yeats

The Stolen Child Quotes

Quotes

“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.”

Explanation: This refrain expresses the fairies’ invitation to the child to leave the human world and enter their magical realm. It also reveals Yeats’s idea that human life is full of sorrow, pain, and confusion, while the fairyland offers an escape into beauty and peace.

“Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim gray sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night.”

Explanation: These lines describe the beauty of the fairies’ world. Under the soft moonlight, the fairies dance joyfully by the shores of Rosses, showing the charm and freedom of their mystical existence.

“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.”

Explanation: These lines appear in the final stanza, where the poet describes what the child loses after going away with the fairies. Though he escapes human pain, he also loses the warmth, love, and peace of home.

 

 

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William Butler Yeats
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