Beyond the Book: Background information when reading The Stolen Child

Beyond the Book

This article relates to The Stolen Child

The Stolen Child is Keith Donohue's first novel. He lives in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. and was, for many years, a speechwriter at the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Stolen Child is inspired by the poem of the same name by W.B. Yeats (bio).

Yeats first published The Stolen Child in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), the volume of poetry that established his reputation. This is the first verse:

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.

Read the full poem at BookBrowse (just below the reading guide).