Today is the birthday of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, more commonly referred to as W.B. Yeats. He was born to an artist father and heiress mother in 1865 in Ireland, but the family moved to London shortly thereafter to benefit his father’s artistic career. 

While in London, Yeats along with his three siblings were informally homeschooled by their mother and father. Their mother regaled the children with Irish stories and folktales, while their father introduced them to geography, chemistry, and natural history, though not in a very cohesive or congruent manner.

By the time Yeats entered a formal school, he kept up with the average children, but showed no signs of the great poet he would become. In fact, he was quite bad at spelling in school, and more interested in biology and zoology than any other subject.

The Yeats family moved back to Dublin in 1880, where life moved along as expected. The children grew, went to real school, and settled into Dublin life. Yeats for his part, spent plenty of time with his father in his father’s studio, and had the chance to meet Dublin’s foremost artists and writers. No doubt the close proximity to successful creatives inspired Yeats to take a similar path. It was during this time he began writing poetry, and his first poem was published in 1885 in the Dublin University paper. 

Influenced by the fairytales his mother had told him as a boy, Yeats had a life-long curiosity in mysticism and the paranormal. His poetry is often stained with folklore and fairy elements as well as gothic tones and symbolic imagery as part of the Symbolism movement of the late 1800s. His poems such as “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Stolen Child” contain examples of this. His later poems were more grounded in reality, specifically current political and cultural events.

Yeats who said “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking”, attempted just that. He fell in love with Irish Nationalist and suffragist Maud Gonne in 1889 and proposed to her three times over three years, taking her three rejections in stride. She was his muse, despite his love being unrequited, and the two maintained a close friendship throughout their lives. 

Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for his contributions, though Yeats himself along with plenty of others, saw the award as an acknowledgement of the newly independent Irish Republic on the national stage. 

Lastly, Yeats gives us this line we could all take to heart a bit more: “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.”

 

The Stolen Child
W. B. Yeats 

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water rats;

There we've hid our faery vats,

Full of berrys

And of reddest stolen cherries.

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.

 

Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim gray sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And anxious in its sleep.

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.

 

Where the wandering water gushes

From the hills above Glen-Car,

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a star,

We seek for slumbering trout

And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams;

Leaning softly out

From ferns that drop their tears

Over the young streams.

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.

 

Away with us he's going,

The solemn-eyed:

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal chest.

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.