Poems by Yeats 3 (3/27/09)

Poem: The Stolen Child (10)
Passage:
"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."


The title of the poem "The Stolen Child", suggests a more violent or sad poem because of the word "stolen" (diction). The reader soon discovers that the poem is more about fairies. The first line reads "Where dips the rocky highland", which suggests a break in reality, which sets the opportunity for the fantastic and ethereal elements of the poem. The age motif, in which Yeats glorifies youth and childhood, dominates the poem. The poem, ultimately, is trying to save a "human child" from reality, and bring him to their world. Yeats is communicating his negative views of the world, through the metaphor of fairies and children. Although the poem is sweet, the harsh tone of "stolen" in the title is continued throughout the poem, for example, in the first line "Away with us he's going" the fairies are declaring that the child is leaving the world with them with an authoritative tone. Then they begin to list (after the colon) all the elements of the child's life he is going to leave, however, they are all positive things, emphasized by the tone. Yeats uses words like "lowing","warm", "sing", "bob", which are subtly contradictory to the message the fairies are communicating: "for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand". Yeats' positive description of what the boy will miss is a metaphor. The boy is still young, he is still a child, which means his life, so far, is "warm" and "lowing", however, the fairies are saving him from reality, and from a world "more full of weeping than you can understand". It is important to notice the diction of the statement "than you can understand", because the fairies are addressing his understanding at this very moment, when he is a child. For example, they do not say "then you can ever understand", meaning, no matter what age or maturity, he wont understand. Because he is too young to understand it, there is still time for him to be with the fairies, unlike Yeats, who is too old, and who understands the world that is "full of weeping".

The italics that are repeated throughout the poem emphasize the lyrical tone of the fairies. The use of repetition is a metaphor for the path of the child. The fairies say three times "For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand", however, by the fourth time, and the last line of the poem, it says "from a world more full of weeping than he can understand". Syntactically, by the end of the poem, the child has left the world, and is with the fairies.