The Stolen Child

I bought a book today, called Fairies in Victorian Art. (I have 'a thing' about fairies.) I bought the book from a second-hand bookshop very near my house. I leafed through some of the Girls' Own Annuals there, saw a message written for someone who was a girl in the 1920s, wishing her a happy birthday, and I felt like crying. I thought of the words of a song: "All those people, all those lives, where are they now? With loves and hates and passions just like mine, they were born and then they lived and then they died. Seems so unfair, and I want to cry."

It's a very lovely bookshop, though, like heaven, if heaven were a place of dust and must and nostalgia.

Anyway, I have been perusing the book I bought. It made me think, all of a sudden, of the poem by Yeats, The Stolen Child. Here it is:

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 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.