A Moving Song

It’s my birthday today(67) and I’m giving my gifts to the children, and posting this song for “The Lost Children” suffering in our world

“”The Stolen Child” was released in 1988 on The Waterboy’s album, Fisherman’s Blues. The song includes lyrics by Yeates and a beautiful lilting melody….making for one of my favorites on an album chocked full of classic Waterboys tunes! The lyrics are mystical and strange…it’s lovely the way they string together….how amazing are the images and flow of this poem? Remastered audio! The poem was written in 1886 and is considered to be one of Yeats’s more notable early poems. The poem is based on Irish legend and concerns faeries beguiling a child to come away with them. Yeats had a great interest in Irish mythology 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.”               Taken from the information attached to the below video

 

The Waterboys – The Stolen Child, Lyrics

Come away human child to the water
Come away human child to the water and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake
There lies the leafy island
Where flapping herons wake the drowsy water rats
There we’ve hid our faery vats full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries

Come away, human child to the water
Come away, human child to the water 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 roses, 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, chase the frothy bubbles
While the world is full of troubles and is anxious in it’s sleep

Come away, human child to the water
Come away, human child to the water 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
And pools among the rushes that scarce could bathe a star
We seek for slumbering trout and whispering in their ears
We give them unquiet dreams
Leaning softly out from ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams

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 around and around the oatmeal chest

For he comes, the human child to the water
He comes, the human child to the water and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
From a world more full of weeping than you can understand

Human child, human child
With a faery, hand in hand
From a world more full of weeping than you can understand
Than you can understand, you can understand

Ivor Steven (c)  2018