The Stolen Child Analysis

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In The Stolen Child, William Butler Yeats illustrates the supernatural world he has created by describing the romantic and peaceful scenarios. In this faery world, every creature shares a harmonious environment. Yeats introduces the beauty of nature in first three stanzas, while he returns to the situations of the modern society in the last stanza. For instance, the mice spin around because they do not have any available food to feed themselves, and human beings are anxious while they are sleeping. Compared with the complicated world of human beings, the faery world seems like the carefree and idealistic paradise. Even though the child is stolen by the faery, this child can enjoy his life in the faery world created by Yeats, rather than …show more content…

“[The] brown mice” (line 48) spin around because there are no available foods to fill their hungry stomachs. On the other hand, human beings probably are short of food supplies as well. Fortunately, when the innocent child goes away with the faery, he or she would not face the starvation anymore. The peaceful faery land, therefore, is extremely appealing to the little child and human beings. However, in the noisy secular world, there are the sounds of “the claves on the warm hillside” (line 45), “the kettle on the hob”(line 46), which “[sing] peace into his breast” (line 47). All the descriptions in Yeats’s The Stolen Child are more or less paradoxical, for there are dangers lurked in the peaceful faery world and the chaotic reality at the same time. There is scarce quietness. The two different worlds are progressively overlapping. Addtionally, when the faery and the child finally are leaving hand in hand, his eyes are solemn. This different expression in his eyes signifies the lost of innocence. At the end of the poem, Yeats does not offer the reader the ending of this little child, who is no longer innocent, and nobody knows whether he is dead, or switched by the fairies, or became a little idiot. This wordless ending leaves the reader to imagine and to ponder the unveiled truth of the faery

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