Point of View

“The Stolen Child” is told largely from a first-person plural point of view, representing the perspective of the fairies who wish to steal a human child away with them “To the waters and the wild” (10). But the first three stanzas contain, respectively, six, three, and four lines of verse before the fairies introduce the subject pronouns that mark the poem as told from their perspective. Rather than describing the fairies themselves, the opening lines of these stanzas center on natural features of the fairies’ environment. In this way the poem’s perspective privileges “the waters and the wild” themselves, indicating that more so than the fairies, Irish geography contains the greatest enchantment. Each of the first three stanzas follows a pattern: a third-person description of the landscape, followed by a first-person plural discussion of the fairies’ activities in that landscape, capped off with a refrain...