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The Stolen Child, by W.B. Yeats
THE STOLEN CHILD
By W.B. Yeats
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 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 of 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.
Every parent who has small children knows how difficult it is to get the little critters settled down when it's time for bed. Down through the centuries, parents of many nations have each developed their own unique ways of bringing peace to the ritual of bedtime.
Our Celtic ancestors, long ago, invented a method to tame the kiddies that many feel has worked wonders in this regard. It is the legend of the Changelings. Many of you have, no doubt, heard stories about the "little people." Some parents call them trolls, others refer to them as leprechauns, and still others speak about the "faery folk."
The legend demands that children always obey their parents when it comes time to go to bed. They are to tuck themselves in quickly, close their little eyes, and quietly scurry off to dreamland. Should they, for any noticeable time, tend to resist the call for sleep and quietness, they run the risk of being carried off to faeryland, where the faeries will keep them prisoners forever. These "naughty" children, according to the legend, will no longer be able to see their parents, and in their place the little people will leave a "Changeling."
In essence, a Changeling is the body of a child that no longer has the "kid" inside. The body walks, talks, goes to school---but the child inside lives somewhere else, far from waking awareness. The children who heard of this legend apparently had such belief in it that there seldom was a problem going to sleep, ever again, after the legend wove its spell.
Parents sometimes do cruel things, in the dispatch of their role as parents. There are traumas, belief systems that inhibit growth, cruel viewpoints that are designed to manipulate little minds, etc. We invent monsters to intimidate our kids, and then spend years trying to convince them that monsters are not real.
PROBLEMS WITH SLEEP
The great metaphysician, Gurdjeff, introduced some fantastic material back in his day. He asserted that all of physical life is a dream, and for humans to remain here in physical form each of us has to be entranced, deep in a kind of soul sleep.
We have spoken in other transmissions about the Veil of Forgetfulness. This is a semi-permeable etheric membrane that surrounds the consciousness of a person in physical form, blocking from his remembrance the knowledge of who and what he is within the greater scheme of things. This enables him to focus here in this context of reality, without being distracted by his many other simultaneous involvements elsewhere.
The inability to properly focus into this Earthly "dream" of physicality, is very similar to a child who has difficulty going to sleep at night. The little mind keeps spinning, spinning, and he or she has no ability to relax and journey off to dreamland. Or, in waking reality, the child cannot bond with parents, or a life situation, and the contract to be here gets aborted, and the child leaves. I am told by Spirit that this is one of the biggest reasons for deaths related to SIDS.
THE STOLEN CHILD
Forgetting about or casting off an important part of childhood (like spiritual guides and playmates) can constitute a major trauma in the life of a young person. For a beautiful visualization of this process, one needs only to check out a copy of the movie "Heart and Souls," released some years ago (usually available in any video store). The whole story plot of the film
centers around the subject matter we are discussing here.
To forget the magical part of self is to lose the essence of what it means to be young and alive. Many people fill psychiatric couches today, looking for missing components in their lives--events and occurrences that might have resulted in huge levels of depression and emptiness they feel later in life. Though every life has its bumps and bruises, and each one takes its toll---few people fully comprehend how badly they were injured when they decided, in a moment of time, to let go of their imagination.
When parents use children as surrogate spouses, or place demands upon their little psyches that require them to prematurely become adults, the "child part" of them departs. From then on, they function as the parents want---but a part of them leaves. The story of Peter Pan, with its many references to "The Lost Boys," is a perfect example of this. Those boys, living in Never-Never Land, were children of trauma and heartbreak. Some of them abandoned, and others driven away, they run off to an etheric refuge of their own making.
There are many who come to me, and tell me about gaping holes in their memories of childhood. When they do, I know that they are speaking about the empty spaces vacated by a "Stolen Child." As the poem says, their world had become more full of weeping than that child could understand. So.......parts of that child departed, leaving only a blank space.
THE BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
The faery kingdoms are real! They exist in a realm which the Celtic peoples call the "betwixt and the between." This is the level of consciousness that separates and borders sleeping and waking. Everyone passes through there as they go in and out of slumber. It is the Gateway into the ever-expanding, ever-wondrous Multiverse. It is the entrance into infinity!
There is truth in the legend of the "Changeling. " However, the beings who dwell there are not monsters or beasts whose purpose in life is to devour and enslave little ones. Rather, they symbolize the very essence of *child-ness* that have been strangled out of children by adults who did not honor and respect their ways or their presence, along with their gifts of playfulness and wonder.
In fact---faeries, leprechauns, and those who inhabit the Devic Realm are said to actually symbolize the *STOLEN CHILD ESSENCE* of those very parents who perpetrate the control and abuse upon these kids. Also, they could also symbolize the soul essence of many wise and magical OLD FOLKS that society never has time to honor anymore. They have been so many things to so many people--across time.
It seems that both ends of life's spectrum can flee from our world when those in control have no patience or interest to deal with the gifts and perspectives which they have to offer. Their habitation becomes one of the many domains which we speak of as META-REALITY.
A changeling is a substitute that the faeries put in the place of a stolen human child. First, they persuade a child to come away with them. Then they replace the stolen child with a sickly substitute that will sicken and fade away. It will die, but the child will be safe in fairyland.
In the poem called The Stolen Child, William Butler Yeats describes the coaxing away of a human child. The child is not actually stolen, but is seduced away to fairyland. The fairies are so poetic, and the world they reveal so enchanting, that the child forgets his family and home, and goes with them. The human world, they tell him, is full of tears, but their world is playful and green.
The poem takes the form of a tour of the country around the Irish town of Sligo, where Yeats spent his youth in his mother's hometown. The journey can actually be followed on a map. First the fairies and the child visit Lough Gill, where Sleuth Wood dips into it. Only some can see the underwater city here. The faeries refer to a leafy island in the lake, but there are about twenty, one of which is the famous Lake Isle of Innisfree. The faeries offer the child sweet fruit, and freedom from care.
Then the fairies describe the beach at Rosses Point, with its wide sands where they will dance all night, chasing the foaming waves in and out. Next, they lead him to a 50-foot waterfall in narrow Glen-Car, not to catch trout but to tease them, whispering to them from the branches of ferns that arch out over the water. Some say the child drowns here, or in the lake where the stream carries him. Perhaps the faeries take him to a barrow on top of the hill.
In any case, they succeed in their persuasion. The solemn child turns away from the warm and comfortable world of men, to join the faeries. His mother will cry for him, but he is too young to really understand that.
The poem was written in 1886, and published in 1889. Yeats was 21 when he wrote it, and at the beginning of his career. It celebrates the stories of Ireland that his mother loved. The images are consciously quaint. Yeats would later compile books of Irish fairy lore.
As he did though, his style grew grand and austere, moving away from the lush, folkloric description of this lovely early poem. Yeats may have loved Ireland in the abstract, and expressed its spirit more than well enough to win a Nobel Prize, but in this poem he loved the actual place in all its reality, and with all the intense enthusiasm of his youth.
the stolen child
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