Loreena McKennitt - The Stolen Child [ Lyrics Video ]

I own nothing. William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s most famous and beloved poet of the 20th century, was intrigued by the Celtic myths and legends of his homeland, a fascination instilled at an early age by his mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen Yeats. His early poem, “The Stolen Child”, first appeared in the Irish Monthly in December 1886, and was published in 1892 in his first book of poetry, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, as well as Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. The poem tells of a mortal child who is lured away to the land of the fairies, far from the troubles and sadness of the human world. It is a romantic metaphor for the universal loss of innocence we all go through as we wrestle with the random, unjust and tragic nature of life, and perhaps a personal expression of Yeats own reckoning with sorrow in his life. Just twenty one years old at the time he wrote the poem, Yeats surely thought of his younger siblings, Robert and Jane, who both died at a young age-Robert at age th