W.B Yeats - The Stolen Child mindmap (context, quotes, form, links)

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  • The Stolen Child (Crossways; 1889)
    • Form
      • envelope rhyme scheme gives a trapped feeling - how children feel / hypnotic fee
      • monosyllabic in refrain represents childish speech 
      • Ballad form – giving it a lyrical childlike quality – emphasising loss of innocence
      • regular rhyming scheme
    • Context
      • 'There is no fine nationality without literature, and no literature without nationality' YEATS
      • Yeats : folklore > realism (in terms of meaning and emotion)
      • Yeats Biographer, Roy Forster, suggests TSC refers to Yeasts younger brother Robert who died 1873.
      • Place names: Sleuth Wood (on banks of Lough Gil Co. Sligo) ; Rosses (noted 'Faery locality' near Sligo) ; Glen-Car (near Sligo)
    • Links
      • " The Cat and the Moon" -- Supernatural quality ; "what better than call a dance?" (mingling hands..)
      • "September 1913" - dissatisfaction with modern Ireland -- "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone"
      • Water in "Easter 1916" --"trouble the living stream" as here, it is used to represent the freedom of the child’s mind etc. whereas in Easter it represents everyday Irish life that people can’t escape from
      • "The Second Coming" -- the use of gyres "turning and turning in the widening gyre" suggesting uncontrollable events occurring at the time. (repeated refrain -- verse changing everytime - as winding gyre?)
    • Quotes
      • As child is leaving poem becomes an elegy / mourning "the solemn-eyed"
      • change to active verb "he comes" as opposed to "come away" - child is being persuaded/ coerced.
      • "hear no more the lowing" internal rhyme, almost onomatopoeic -- comforting
      • "mingling hands and mingling glances"
      • nervous language -- sense of tension/ unease : "troubles" "anxious in its sleep" " unquiet dreams"
      • Sexual implications - "reddest stolen cherries"
      • From a world more full of weeping than HE can understand.
        • 'he' - emphasises distance between child and human world
        • Full stop finalises poem, the child is a lost cause

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