William Butler Yeats' poetry evolved from his early works like "The Stolen Child" to his later works such as "Sailing to Byzantium." In his youthful poems, Faeryland was a whimsical place where fairies tempted children, but in his older age, Faeryland represented eternal fame and recognition in Byzantium. Yeats' love for Irish nationalist Maud Gonne also matured, as he realized his idealized version of her did not match reality. By comparing his depictions of Faeryland and relationships in early and late poems, one sees how Yeats' perspectives transformed as he aged yet retained his desire to escape to a better world.

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Katie Cline
Dr. Porter
EH 313.01
29 February 2016
Finding Faeryland: Yeats’s Great Escape
William Butler Yeats is one of the most iconic poets from the twentieth century. His fiery
Irish nationalism, vivid imagery, and escapist themes create poems that have transcended the
decades. Yeats, unlike many poets, lived a full life, which allowed his poetry to grow and mature
with him. Such progressions can be seen most clearly when analyzing one of Yeats’s early
poems, such as “The Stolen Child,” and one of his last poems, “Sailing to Byzantium.” By
comparing these poems, readers can see that the utopian world of the latter poem is just an
evolved form of the utopia in the former. This maturation of what Yeats refers to as “Faeryland”
also parallels his relationship with the Irish activist Maud Gonne, whom he pined after in his
youth. After careful analysis, however, the reader can conclude that Yeats’s love for Gonne is
more a displaced sense of nationalism: he loves the heroine he creates in his mind and in his
poetry more so than the actual woman she is. Yeats comes to terms with this later in his life and
poetry. “The Stolen Child” and “Sailing to Byzantium” provide a timeline that highlights the
most distinct differences in diction, tone, and content between Yeats’s early and Modern periods;
the unifying factor is that both contain an idyllic world to which the speaker hopes to escape.
“The Stolen Child” was written in 1886 when Yeats was twenty-one years old, and his
own youth is directly reflected in the poem’s diction and tone. “The Stolen Child” tells the story
of mischievous fairies who attempt to entice a human child away to their faeryland. This plot is
based on the changeling myth, an old folk story where fairies replaced a human child with a

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changeling creature. The changeling was always subpar to the human: less beautiful and
vivacious and more listless and unbecoming. Yeats imagines how such a switch could take place
by crafting a whimsical faeryland that fairies use to bait children:
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 berries
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. (1-12)
The short lines and masculine end rhyme scheme give the poem a light bounce that reflects the
youthfulness of both the subjects and the poet, but much of the mystical quality of this poem
comes from Yeats’s evocative imagery. His use of color in his early poems is important as
readers can often watch the poem’s setting transform into faeryland by the use of gold and silver
color imagery. In “The Stolen Child,” there are no direct references to gold or silver, but Yeats
does play on the ideas of moonlight, water, and stars, which have silver connotations. Most of
the fantasy in this poem comes from the objects themselves, such as the “leafy island,” “drowsy
water rats,” and “stolen cherries,” creating a setting that many modern readers may imagine as

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Neverland from J.M. Barrie and Disney’s Peter Pan (3, 5, 8). The italicized refrain that
concludes each stanza is the fairies’ chant. With a rhyme scheme of “AABB,” these last four
lines continue the childish, singsong effect of the poem while simultaneously giving the ominous
impression that a spell is being cast to lure the human child away to Faeryland. By the end of the
poem, the human child agrees to go with the fairies and leave its world behind. Yeats’s
insinuation is that the fairies eventually steal every child, and the changelings that replace them
are adults, who are left to navigate this human world of weeping without any chance of escape.
Yeats’s early poems, with their playful faeryland, were written when he was madly in
love with Maud Gonne, a passionate Irish patriot. Gonne never returned his affections, and Yeats
was left to pine after her through his poetry. In some ways, his constant search for Faeryland
mirrors his search for Gonne’s love, and therefore his escape into that world symbolizes his
escape into her. Yeats also uses several real Irish locations in his works to add to the realism of
Faeryland, including Sleuth Wood and Glen-Car Lough in “The Stolen Child.” This is a nod
toward Yeats’s strong Irish nationalism, something that he and Gonne bonded over. It is also the
first sign of Yeats mixing fantasy and reality, and this creates a dilemma for him, as he comes to
realize that he does something similar with Maud Gonne.
In order to fully understand how Yeats’s relationship with Gonne is reflected in his
poetry, a reader must compare his early works to his later ones. “Sailing to Byzantium” was
written in 1926 near the end of Yeats’s life and career. Though it is starkly different from “The
Stolen Child” in terms of tone and content, “Sailing to Byzantium” still contains a faeryland of
sorts. Yeats views Byzantium as the artist’s Faeryland. Rather than being tempted by fairies and
stolen fruit, however, this haven promises eternal glory, a cultural impact long after the poet is
dead. Because of the recurrence of gold and silver imagery, a reader can see that Yeats is still

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referring to Faeryland:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Greecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (25-32)
As in “The Stolen Child,” Yeats is discussing leaving one world—in this case, the world of the
living as described by “out of nature” —in exchange for a new and better one (25). This heaven-
like place is symbolized by Byzantium, and, here, Yeats will live on with other artists, and his
works will withstand the tests of time and be read for generations to come.
“Sailing to Byzantium” is a poem narrated by an old man who no longer feels he has a
place in the natural, human world, and in this way it directly reflects Yeats’s own place in life.
He has grown up; he is no longer the bold, effervescent young adult who wrote “The Stolen
Child;” he is a man entering the twilight of his life; he has loved and lost and suffered. The rose
color has been wiped off his glasses, and he has matured. Yet he still dares to dream of a place
where all this can be left behind, just as he did when he was young. It makes sense that the
faeryland from “The Stolen Child” would differ in content from the faeryland that is Byzantium
because just as adults do not want children’s toys for Christmas, so, too, would an adult Yeats’s
idea of the perfect world mature as he aged. Byzantium is a far more practical version of the
Faeryland he once wrote about. The faeryland of “Sailing to Byzantium” does not focus on the

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impish antics of fairies or encourage the subject to shirk responsibility; rather, it paints the image
of a refuge for those wearied by life, a place where the artist—separate from his physical body—
can enter the “artifice of eternity” (24).
By the time he writes “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats has moved on from his childhood
love, Maud Gonne. Her husband, John MacBride, was executed following the Easter Rebellion
of 1916, and though Yeats had a chance to marry Gonne, he never did. He no longer loved her as
passionately as he did in his youth, and many readers and scholars agree that his love may never
have been as extreme as he made it out to be. It is likely that the Maud Gonne that young Yeats
loved was a constructed idealization, much like Faeryland itself. Yeats creates a perfect woman
in his poetry and in his mind that the real Gonne could never compare to. It is also believed that
Yeats’s love for Ireland and Irish nationalism influenced his feelings for Gonne. Whatever the
reason, by late adulthood, Yeats has outgrown his love for Gonne, just as he outgrew his
childlike Faeryland.
William Butler Yeats never gives up on Faeryland. As he goes through life, Faeryland
continuously evolves to meet his changing perceptions of idealism. His clever fairies from “The
Stolen Child” become complimentary critics in “Sailing to Byzantium.” The tempting fruit
becomes posthumous recognition. His once all-consuming love becomes a friendly flame. But
one thing is consistent: his desire to escape to a better world than the one he lives in, his
twentieth century Ireland filled with political turmoil, heartache, and ignorance. In the end, Yeats
does find his Faeryland. He is immortalized in textbooks and anthologies, proving that
Byzantium (and the Faeryland it evolved from) may not be a fictitious wonderland after all; it is
a real place, but it is accessible only by those who keep searching for it.
Word Count: 1529