Poem of the Day: ‘The Stolen Child’

The world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. And what is one to say, encountering a line like that in the first book of a young poet? It’s too romantic, even cheesy. It’s too literary, too oracular, too willfully folkloric and mythopoeic. It’s also perfect. And there, from the beginning of his work, we see the triumph and the puzzle of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), whose 157th birthday is today, June 13. In honor of the poet most and yet somehow least imitable in modern English poetry, the Sun is presenting a week of Yeats. And to start, we have “The Stolen Child,” a mostly trimeter four-stanza 1886 poem of the faeries stealing a human child out of some alien motive that resembles pity and yet is pitiless: he comes, the human child, / To the waters and the wild.