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.
-W.B. Yeats from “The Stolen Child”
Who hasn’t felt the impulse to arrest a child’s development, to preserve a certain marvelous stage of growing and becoming. The innocent child does not yet know the pain and duplicity of personal sin. The adult falls into distant musings: anxiety for things not yet arrived, sadness over what has already happened. The immediacy of the present moment, the full feeling of now is obscured. Sometimes, we get to catch a glimpse:
A child haltingly read aloud a picture book about a bird with a broken wing. A lone fisherman rescued the bird and helped the wing to heal. Once the bird recovered, the man realized it was time to release the bird back to the wild. The man was sad to see his feathered companion go and felt lonely in the bird’s absence.
A mother anguished with herself and the world cried silently as the story was read. Correcting a word here and prompting pronunciation there, the cares of the world pressed in, weighing down.
Without looking up from the story, the child, tears subtly forming in the luminous pools of her own eyes, said matter-of-factly, “I almost can’t help crying myself reading this.”
Oh, blessed child, “the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
