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A six-movement choral cycle on texts by Yeats. The eponymous poem, in which faeries tempt a child to come away with them into the wild (i.e., adulthood), is divided between a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue and epilogue frame the four inner movements, which concern childhood, adolescence, and old age and form a “life cycle.” The six movements are:
• Prologue: The Stolen Child
• To a Child Dancing in the Wind (I)
• To a Child Dancing in the Wind (II)
• A Memory of Youth
• When You are Old
• Epilogue: The Stolen Child
Text (excerpt): William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Away with us he's going, the solemn-eyed: he'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside or the kettle on the hob sing peace into his breast, or see the brown mice bob round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child, to the waters and the wild with a faery, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
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