A Micheál Mac Liammóir watercolour leads Christian Dupont back to Yeats’ ‘The Stolen Child’
‘Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand…’ So begins the entreating chorus of one of WB Yeats’ earliest and most evocative poems. Yeats was twenty-one when he penned ‘The Stolen Child’, which appeared a few months later in the December 1886 issue of Irish Monthly. The setting depicts the enchanted landscapes of Sligo he explored as a boy, while the narrative echoes the tales of spirits he had heard from Paddy Flynn, whom he described as ‘a little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare’. 1 Sleuth (now Slish) Wood, the Rosses and Glencar Waterfall all figure in the lyric. There the fairies ‘foot it all the night, / Weaving olden dances / Mingling hands and mingling glances / Till the moon has taken flight’
Stephanie McBride explores Deirdre Brennan’s photographic response to James Joyce’s Ulysses
