William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was a notable Irish poet and Nobel laureate. His style encompasses a great range of themes, but many of his early poems drew heavily from the rich Irish mythology, and it is from his poem The Stolen Child, that I take the title of my page.

And now, for those of you unfamiliar with popular themes of Irish Mythology, a word on changlings.

In older times, when the Fair Folk still crossed into this land, they would take young, healthy, human children into their lands, leaving in the child's place a changling-- a sickly one of their own guised as the human child. Normally, the 'sickly child' would die, and the parents would never know the wiser. As such, it was often thought bad to praise your child too openly, lest the Fair Folk would hear and decide to take the child for themselves. The Stolen Child touches on just this theme, where the fairies lure a human child back into their own world.

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 the reddest of 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 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 drp 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,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

William Butler Yeats, Early Poems, Dover, 1993.