24 All-Star Readers on the Words That Rock Their Worlds

Matt Dillon

I heard "The Stolen Child," by William Butler Yeats, one afternoon on Grafton Street in Dublin. Standing there was a bearded man with haunted eyes, busking for change. He had a sandwich board draped over his shoulders with a long list of poems he could recite from memory. I was amazed as the words boomed with gusto from this madman. A human poem jukebox. Only in Dublin! I sometimes take the book off the shelf and read it out loud: "Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."

Read "The Stolen Child" by William Butler Yeats