Why John Connolly chose this poem
I first came to The Stolen Child through The Waterboys, who set it to music for their Fisherman’s Blues album. Before that I had associated Yeats, unfortunately but understandably, with school work and cramming for my Leaving Cert, but hearing Tomás Mac Eoin – “a Matterhorn of a voice”, to borrow Mike Scott’s description – recite The Stolen Child against The Waterboys’ gentle, understated musical backing transformed my perceptions of the poet and helped awaken a love of poetry that has never since faded. It is, I think, the most haunting of Yeats’s poems, and its ending, as the “solemn-eyed” child (God, how I love that description!) departs “a world more full of weeping than he can understand”, never fails to move me.
John Connolly’s latest novel is A Song of Shadows
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 berrys
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 gray 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 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,
For the world’s more full of weeping than
he can understand.
