Loreena McKennitt - Stolen child

Chorus:
Come away, oh 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.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light
By far off 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 is anxious in its sleep.

Chorus

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.

Chorus

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 fairy hand in hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.

Poem by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Music by Loreena McKennitt
From: Elemental (1985).

Live version: Live in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts (1995).

Another live version appears on Troubadours on the Rhine (2012)
and: The mask and mirror Live (2024)

The song can also be found on The journey so far - The Best of Loreena McKennitt (2014).

The lyrics are printed in the CD-booklet (thanks to Kevin Eckard for pointing me at some typing errors); some notes on them:

• The last line of the Chorus is written as "Than you can understand". It is unclear to me whether Loreena actually sings "you" here: it sounds more like "he", or possibly "ye", but I leave "you" as that is in the poem (see below).
  In the final line of the song it clearly is "you", though.
• Near the end of the 2nd stanza the booklet has "Whilst the world is full of troubles", but Loreena clearly sings "While the world ...", which is also what the poem (see below) says.
• The second line of the 4th stanza in the booklet is "The solemned eyed". I corrected this, as it sounds more like "The solemn-eyed", and that is what the poem itself (see below) says.

• Some words in the poem are spelled slightly different, and I copied that above: capital letters in "Sleuth Wood", "Rosses" and "Glen-Car", and a dash in "water-rats" plus the spelling of "solemn-eyed" (as mentioned above).
• In the Chorus and the last stanza the spelling is "faery" in the CD-booklet, whereas the poem has "fairy".
  According to my dictionary [Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1988] "faery" is "the world or power of fairies: the imaginary world of stories", whereas "fairy" is "usually small imaginary figure with magical powers and shaped like a human".
  Evidently the latter spelling is the correct one here: the poems contains the line "With a fairy hand in hand" and one can simply not hold hands with the world of fairies, only with a fairy itself. In "There we've hid our fairy vats" it might be "faery", but that is not necessary.
• The last line of the "Chorus" in the poem read "... than you can understand"; only the last line of the poem has "... than he can understand", but Loreena clearly sings "you" there, so I leave that above.
• The poem has a few lines which are different, probably because Loreena thought it sound better for the song this way. They are:
  • Chorus and last stanze, second line: "To the woods and waters wild"
  • 2nd stanza, third line: "Far off by farthest Rosses"
  • 3rd stanza, seventh line: "We give them evil dreams"
  • 3rd stanza, tenth line: "Of dew on the young streams"
• The third time the Chorus appears in the poem, it starts actually with "Come! O, human child!", without "away", but that is not really an important difference.

 
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last modified: 9 May 2024