The Stolen Child !!

Sunday Morning.  Sweet Images.  Soothing Sounds.  Softly flows the day away.  So, a Story for Sunday.  In Seanachaí Verse .....

The picture is of Glencar Waterfall, County Leitrim, Ireland.  It provided the inspiration for Irish Poet William Butler Yeats  (Ireland's Poet Laureate) to pen "The Stolen Child",  which was published in 1889 in 'The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems'.  This poem is based on Irish legend and concerns faeries beguiling a child to come away with them. Yeats had a great interest in Pagan Irish legend about Faeries resulting in his publication of 'Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry' in 1888 and 'Fairy Folk Tales of Ireland' in 1892. The places mentioned in the poem are in Leitrim and Sligo where Yeats spent much of his childhood. 

The poem reflects the early influence of Romantic literature and Pre-Raphaelite Verse & is considered to be one of Yeats' more notable early poems.

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
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand

Even as a 'wee one' I understood that the world was full of Weeping & Woe & I spent my early childhood wanting to be a stolen child …. A Foundling Found by the Fairies!!

I Always believed in Magic .... still do!   Maybe that's my Misanthrope .....

Anyways, enjoy the Pictures below .... they are all of Ireland.  I miss the Soft Rains of Sunday Morning at home.  (I am more than a year away now!)  And, the Music is provided by Galway band, The Waterboys, Irish Lads!!!