Just as in ‘The Stolen Child’ the water is swallowing the child’s soul and youthful freedom. This links to “the brimming lake” present in both ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ and ‘Broken Dreams’ where it is described as “mysterious”, in context suggesting the consumption of Yeats’ soul. However the sinister undertone is still very much present, the gushing water suggests the “human child” is being consumed by his surroundings, drowned in natural lexis that holds dark and evil undertones of death. The soft alliteration of “wandering water” creates a mystical serenity and the adjective “gushes” rolls softly off the tongue, juxtaposed by the imagery of “bath a star“, both ideas create a continuous flow of romantic imagery apparent throughout the whole stanza. Verse three is brimming with water lexis, “wandering water gushes… pools among the rushes…young streams”, here again an audience witnesses the tactical ambiguity in Yeats’ descriptions. Beauty and fear in the poem are not binary opposites instead they are fused together with ambiguity, ultimately concluding in evil.
The same technique is seen in Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” where nature and sexuality are aligned, “a sudden blow” holds violent and sexual connotations, one is unsure as to which of these is being suggested. The verb “stolen” also foreshadows the fate of the child in the poem, as the line is juxtaposed with the refrain “Come away, O human child!… to the wild”. The dual meaning of “wild” holds ambiguity as Yeats could be suggesting the wild in terms of exotic nature, yet it creates chilling imagery of a dangerous wood rife with uncertainty. This technique, along with the light-hearted rhyming structure (ABABCCDD), abducts from the sinister undertone of the poem and causes us to brush over the fact that these berries and cherries are in fact “stolen”. Yeats introduces us to a “leafy island” in Sleuth Wood “full of berries” and “drowsy water-rats”, his use of adjectives create fanatical imagery and connote natural colours of green, reds and blue. The poem is heavy in the semantic field of nature. Prior to reading the poem, this definition holds ambiguity as whether the control is of an evil or angelic nature, however the poem progresses to reveal the cold and severe undertone of the evil and corrupt abduction of the child. It is thus that Yeats uses ambiguous language to explore the notion of ‘the evil versus the angelic’ via the motif of the Irish mythological creatures: the ‘faeries’, defined as goddesses who control people’s lives. Published in 1889, in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, the traditional Irish ballad form reflects the early influence of Romantic Literature and Pre-Raphaelite verse. The Stolen Child is recognised to be one of the more notable of Yeats’ early poems.
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