Stolen Children

Today I got in the car and heard the news of the Las Vegas massacre. On the way home, they played Tom Petty after announcing his passing. His lyric “I don't understand the world today” haunts me on this day of inconceivable loss. So many lost their lives to the act of a man that never before raised the slightest alarm.

In Irish culture, such turns of fate are explained as the works of faeries, the mystical beings of the eternal woods who come and exchange the dead for the living. A victim of a stroke who loses some faculty is said to have been deprived by a faery, taking his good mind and replacing it with something tarnished. Like pirates, they return to the forest with their booty, enjoying endless revelry, unconcerned by the blemishes left by their passing through the world of mortal humans.

Yeats wrote of the legend of the faeries, how it would console those who lost a sibling before their time. While they came and went like grim reapers, the fear of their coming was balanced by a pagan notion of heaven where the lost child would enjoy a life without care for time eternal.

The Stolen Child

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

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.