William butler yeats stolen child11/7/2023 The themes scrutinised there will be: the fascination of Ireland and Irish past, the blind children as outcasts of the society and the father-daughter relationship between the two protagonists Padraic and Dana. The same procedure has to be conducted with the McCann’s short story. There are three main themes that occur in Yeats’s poem, which need to be explained in order to achieve a clear terminology before it comes to describing the actions of McCann’s short story: The imagination of a different, a parallel world the phenomenon of fairies and the reception of fairies in the Irish folklore and the dilemma of parents losing their children to faeries. This allows me, in a second step, to connect the knowledge about the aspects shared by both works and give interpretations in a stringent manner, with all necessary background knowledge already given. In first step, I will pick out important aspects from the two texts and give detail on topics such as fairies and Irish mythology as far as concerning either the poem or the short story. I hereby pose the thesis that Irish mythology and Yeats’ poem influenced the short story written by Colum McCann. The most remarkable indication is the story’s title, which goes like the title of Yeats’s poem: Stolen child, but other themes such as that of the Irish goddess Dana or the topic of fairies seem to fit both works. As Yeats is a famous Irish Poet and Colum McCann is an Irish writer, there is a high chance that he knew the poem and weaved in some of its topics on purpose. It is part of “Fishing in the sloe-black river”, a collection of short stories by the same author and was first published in 1994. “Stolen Child” is a short story written by Colum McCann. „Stolen Child“ by William Butler Yeats is a poem which he wrote in 1886. About one century before the famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats had wrote his famous poem “The Stolen Child” and thereby made these words something that modern day literates quite surely know and would not use if not wanting to make a clear reference towards his poem. The title is nothing new in Irish literature. A remarkably sad topic that the Irish-American writer uses as a title for his short story. When reading contemporary Irish literature, one will probably stumble across his small short story and not be able to do else but to wonder about the story’s title: “Stolen Child”. It so happened with Colum McCann, when he moved to New York. For many of them, this typical Irish landscape and folklore had played an important role in finding a new identity in the foreign country. On the other hand, Ireland has seen many of its children emigrate into every part of the world in the last century. Ireland has still lost nothing of its fascination that once worked as the fundament for the myths and folklore of a whole country. Quiet fields of green, wet grass the wind howling over the highlands an ocean so big and blue that one cannot help, but feel melancholically. Dana: Irish goddess Irish mythology and stereotypical Irish places
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