Solitude Is Not a Punishment. It Is an Instrument. — W. B. Yeats's Stolen Child, the Cornish Island of Bryher, and the Quiet Art of Being Alone

On a rocky water-edge in County Sligo, a young William Butler Yeats hears voices on the wind. They are not human voices. They are the faeries of Irish folklore, and they are calling a human child away — out of his mother's house, into the wild lakes and woods and waters, beyond the reach of a world that has grown too noisy with its grief. Come away, O human child, they sing, four times across the poem, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks what it means to choose solitude — not as a wound, not as a punishment, but as an instrument we can learn to play. The guest poem is "The Stolen Child" by W. B. Yeats (1886), written when the poet was only twenty-one — a piece that announces his whole career to come. It draws on the genuine fear of changelings in Irish folk tradition, then turns the story inside out by letting the faeries speak the poem themselves. The result is one of the most musical and morally ambiguous summonses-to-elsewhere in English verse. Is the calling-away a horror or a mercy? Yeats refuses, beautifully, to tell us. Alden then reads his own poem, "Bryher," a portrait of a small Cornish island where the waves strike hard on Hell Bay's shore and a single cottage holds its ground against the western swell. Where Yeats's child is called away, Bryher is the destination — the wild place that has chosen itself, where the wind writes verses on the sand and solitude becomes a choice. The episode closes with a practical discussion every writer and reader will recognise: the writing retreat. Why poets from Wordsworth at Grasmere to Dylan Thomas at Laugharne have always sought islands. How to construct a productive solitude, whether a week away or an hour each morning. And what solitude, properly practised, can give back to the work. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. There is poetry to be found. Solitude is not a punishment. It is an instrument.