Love for Ireland Motif
Yeats was well-known for his love of Ireland and his constant desire to promote it. Each of the poems in this collection convey to the reader that Ireland is a place of great beauty that instills a great and enduring love in anyone who hails from there. The main example of this is Oisin; he is given immortality and travels the Immortal Islands with his fairy princess Niamh, experiencing many wonderful things and never ageing. However, he still yearns for Ireland and wants desperately to return to see his old friends and to see the place he grew up again. Even a man who can never die is willing to jeopardize his immortality just to see Ireland once more.
The child in the poem entitled The Stolen Child is similarly in love with his pastoral home. There are calves on the hillside, grazing. They are bathed in sunshine (which is likely poetic license since Ireland is well known for it's almost continual rain). The view from the kitchen window is always the same which is reassuring, just as the kettle on the stove, ready to welcome anyone entering the home, and the mice playing happily around the oatmeal barrel. These descriptions seem to be written with such a deep love for the surroundings that they are probably drawn from the poet's own memory. They are shown to be surroundings so enrapturing that even the beauty of the ethereal other-world cannot compete with them.
Interaction Between Physical and Metaphysical Worlds Motif
All of the poems in this collection have a degree of interaction between the physical and metaphysical worlds; the key proponent of this motif is the title poem of the collection, as Oisin begins a relationship with a fairy princess and essentially gives up the physical world to travel the metaphysical world with her forever. There is nothing frightening about these interactions, in fact, they seem to be presented as something that is perfectly normal; the characters in the poems accept the existence of the faeire world without question and are therefore not feeling any trepidation about moving from one world to the other.
Love Motif
Love is an important motif in the poems and seems to be a driving force behind the actions of the characters. Oisin gives up his life in his beloved Ireland for his fairy princess, although it seems that the fairy characters are able to "bewitch" the physical world characters into loving them without questioning their feelings. Oisin waits three hundred years before succumbing to the pull of his home and his compatriots. Niamh is so in love with him that she gives him her own horse to ensure that he is able to come back to her.
The Speaker in Down by the Salley Gardens is feeling lonely and melancholy because of a lost love. He describes in great detail, as if it was yesterday, seeing his love walking over the grass, and also describes his anguish that he did not take her up on the offer of love and of letting their love grow naturally like the grass.
White Feet Symbol
The lost love that the Speaker is yearning for has "snow white" feet, which implies that she comes from a well-to-do family. Most of the characters Yeats describes in his poems are involved in farming in some way, or in other land-based activities, which mean that they are laboring and their skin becomes weather-beaten. Not so the Speaker's lost love; she is so lily white because she is never outside for very long which indicates a more well-to-do, indoor existence.
Boiling Kettle Symbol
The boiling kettle on the stove in the poem entitled The Stolen Child is a symbol of the happy home that the boy comes from and also a symbol of his family's open door that always welcomes friends and strangers alike. This is something that Yeats believed was a symbol of Irish people in general and so he uses it in the context of the little boy's home to show the friendliness and welcoming attitude of his fellow Irishmen and women.
