Wednesday, January 16, 2019

How is William Butler Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child" structured and what is its style?

William Butler Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child" is structured into four stanzas with a basic ABAB CDCD EFEF and so on rhyme scheme. Each of the first three stanzas ends with an invitation to the titular child to "come away" to the scene described in the poem. The last four lines of each of the first through third stanzas actually repeat the exact lines:

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.

The final stanza basically repeats the same four lines, but now the child has decided to come away with the speaker and the others mentioned in the poem because "the world's more full of weeping than he can understand." 
The style of the poem is affected by the rhyme scheme, as well. The basic rhyme scheme gives the poem a childlike mood. The references to faeries and "olden dances" makes this place that the speaker beckons the child to seem like a magic world. This is contrasted by the real world, the one that is "full of weeping." The magical world serves as an outlet or an escape from the harsh reality of the human realm. 

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