The Stolen Child

I am not an expert on poetry least of all Yeats, though I do admire the beauty of The Two Trees. My knowledge of The Stolen Child (also) comes from Loreena McKennitt's musical rendition of it.

I believe faeries existed and exist as creations of the human mind to explain the inexplicable or at times to blame others for human action. In this poem it is interesting that the faeries have a perception of the world as a painful place and this motivates them to spare children that pain by removing them from the human world. I see in this poem a metaphor for the all too frequent stealing of childhood "The Stolen Child"
by parents and other abusive adults who have themselves been abused and have had their childhood (and their inner "child" stolen.

I agree with the nationalism comments, but I'm not entirely sure that he was referencing colonialism. (Remember, he was a Protestant Irishman, and so closer to the British than the Catholic Irish who tended to protest more.) I'm of the opinion that the Ireland he missed was more cultural than factual/literal, and more a childhood dream than any type of reality. Perhaps he missed his memories of Ireland.
I'm basing this on the idealized, fantasic wording of the poem. Faeries are not precisely common, everyday phenomena, and he liberally laces the poem with mythology/folklore references gleaned from childhood stories and superstitions. Adding to this poem his other works, you can tell that he's obsessed with the supernatural and mythological. He's trying to recapture something.
He wrote a compendium of Irish folklore, called Mythology, in which he records fragmented tales. They're told in an almost childlike manner, often playing with choronology and typical story format (no clear beginning-middle-end) in ways that children often unconsciously do. The fact that he chose Irish myths, and went back to Ireland to listen to children's stories as an adult, seems to indicate to me a sense of lost childhood and the lost "ideal" Ireland that one could sense as a child, when one could believe more in faerie than British opporessors and revolts. Of course, as an Irish American, I'd love to turn this into a manifesto of anticolonial rage, but I'm reading it as a quasi-Freudian attempt to recapture childhood through fantasies.

This poem, I have noticed is so different in it's meaning for everone who reads it, depending mostly on their own life experiences.
It seems to me that since the faeries are the ones speaking in the poem, it is not they who wish to steal the child but it is they who view the child as stolen. The Faeries for me, represent the thing that calls to each of us at night when we are quiet which knows that there must be something better in this world than the dissapointing reality of suffering and hardships that we have come to accept as inevitable. The small pleasures we find in the "human" world (as mentioned in the last stanza) serve only to lull us into complacency and in order to find this better place, we know in our hearts that it may be necessary to abandon them. Whether the poem ends in suicide or simply a new mindset is something my friends and I have been mulling over for a long, long time. There has also been a suggestion that the faerie may actually have something to do with the use of absinthe and it's hallucinagenic properties (I'm not inclined to agree with this however). As I said, this poem is very susceptible to interpretation based on ones own experiences but I really feel as though Yeats is using the faerie mythology from his own childhood to put a name and face to the things within our own selves that want constantly to lure us away from reality and toward a more ideal life.

“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.” This quote is by William Butler Yeats in his poem” The Stolen Child”. In this poem Yeats speaks of a fairy who coaxes young children into going with her to the Fairy kingdom. She does this because the world these children are living in is depriving them of their childhood. This loss of innocence is a central idea to the poem. Yeats goes about detailing and emphasizing this idea through two main literary techniques: one being vivid imagery and the other being repetition of key terms and phrases within each stanza. The symbolism of the fairy is also an important part of the poem, despite (or perhaps because of) the ambiguity relating to its literal meaning.

I think Sriparna raises a good point about how "Yeats focuses on the fact that it is good to make an escape to a fairy land but earthly bindings cannot be totally negated." We've been studying Yeats in relation to his involvement in the Irish Literary Revival and the politics of the time, and maybe the "earthly bindings" could be viewed as the presence of English rule in Ireland. Yeats saw the English hegemony as holding back the development of an Irish Literary tradition, and Edward Said argued that Nationality was "recoverable at first only through the imagination" so Yeats could be beginning to recover an Irish Nationality but also recognising that it must be achieved in the real world also.