Among School Children By William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats wrote this poem, Among School Children, most probably in 1926 after his
visit in that year to a progressive convent school at Waterfront, St. Otteran’s School. The
poem, Among School Children, was inspired by his senate-sponsored visit to Waterfront Convent
as a sixty-year-old Senator of the free Irish State in the capacity of the Inspector of schools. The
poem begins in the first person (‘I’) most naturalistically in the standard pattern of a guided tour
and reaches the philosophic heights. In the words of W.H. Hudson, “Yeats has a knack of raising
occasional poetry to the level of a profound poetry of universal appeal and significance. Among
School, Children can be cited as an example.” This poem is considered to be one of the finest of
Yeats’s compositions, which attempt at synthesizing “the sixty-year-old smiling public man,” the
aged one-time lover, and the would-be philosopher into something as organic as a chestnut tree
and as coherent as a dancer’s movements.

1. The first stanza describes the poet’s visit to a progressive Convent School at Waterford for
children between the ages of four to seven years. He visited the school in 1926 as a member
of a government committee appointed to investigate the state of Irish education. It was in that
capacity that Yeats paid a visit to this school run by the nuns on the Montessori Method of
teaching.

The poet says that it was a long visit in which he went the whole length of school, from one
classroom to another classroom asking all sorts of questions. Going along with him was a kind
old nun, in a white hooded dress and providing answers to his questions. In the school Yeats
finds the children (all girls in the age-group of 4 to 7 years) learning to solve arithmetical
problems, to sing, to cut and sew. The students are also made to read books and histories. They
are required to be neat and clean in doing everything. The girls are told to do everything in the
“best modern way”, which refers to the Montessori Method of teaching which has been recently
introduced in this particular school. There is a surprise in the eyes of the girl-students who are
gazing with surprise in their eyes at a sixty-year old smiling public man (officer).

2. In the second stanza, the poet’s thoughts go back to Maud Gonne who was once graceful and
beautiful like Leda who later became the mother of Helen for whom a ten-year War, Trojan War was
fought, which is the theme of Homer’s epic Iliad. But Maud Gonne, whom Yeats loved and wanted
to marry, has grown old as the poet is a sixty-year old man now. The poet reveals those youthful days
when he and she used to have intimate talks. He remembered an incident of her student days which
she told him once. She had been snubbed by a teacher and the snubbing had made her miserable:
“trivial event that changed some childish day to tragedy.” On learning of this incident, the poet had
deeply sympathized with her. Due to their mutual sympathies, their two natures had mingled together.
It seemed that he and he had become united in a single body or, to change this mode of expression,
they had become united, though retaining their separate identities like the yolk and white of an egg.
3. The above lines of the third stanza bring the poet back from his world of imagination and past
memories to the classroom of the school where he was a visitor. Keeping still in his mind the fit of
grief or anger which Maud Gonne felt at the snubbing by the teacher, the poet now looks upon the
faces of children in the classroom one by one. He does so in order to find out if Maud Gonne might
 have looked like any of these girls at the same age. For his attempt at doing so, the poet advances the
logic that even the superior ladies like Helen (or Maud) have much in common with the children of
ordinary mortals like the paddlers. Helen was born of the union of Leda and the Swan (the swan being
really Zeus in the guise of a swan bird). The poet is wonder-struck to imagine that one of the little
girls standing before him in the classroom is no other than Maud Gonne as she much had been in her
school days.

4. The stanza four portrays Maud Gonne though, in the earlier stanza, Maud Gonne was
imagined by the poet as a little girl standing before him in the school just as she must have
been in her school days.

The very next moment in the fourth stanza the poet thinks of Maud Gonne as she must be
now, in her old age. As the poet visualizes the aged Maud Gonne now, he thinks of her
hollow cheeks. Now she appears so thin that he thinks that she probably lives on the food of
winds and shadows. Her appearance in her old age reminds him of the portrait of an old
woman by some fifteenth-century Italian painter who had painted her old-age portrait with
hollow cheeks. Then the poet refers to himself and says that he never possessed the beauty of
Leda, but there certainly was a time when he was young and considered handsome. But now,
his good looks and youth are no more. However, there is no reason why he should not smile
at all those who meet him with a smile. He says he may have the looks of a scarecrow, but he
must pretend to be comfortable and cheerful.
5. In the earlier stanza, the poet has shown how Maud Gonne and he himself looked in the old
age. She has been visualized as an old woman with hollow cheeks looking like a painting of a
hollow-cheeked woman painted by a fifteenth-century Italian painter. He may have been
looking like a scarecrow, wearing loose and worn out clothes but smiling.

But in this stanza, the poet goes back to the child from an old lady. In the beginning, the poet
gives a picture of a little child behaving in its natural childish manner, sleeping, shrieking or
struggling to escape. The poet then proceeds to paint the picture of the same creature as he would
be in his old age with sixty or more winters on his head. There is a terrible contrast between the
sweet angelic child and the old scarecrow. If a young mother were to visualize her little child as
he would be at the age sixty or more, she would begin to wonder whether it was worthwhile for
her to have undergone all the pain of giving birth to him or all the uncertainty of that birth. Thus
here the poet dwells upon the curse of old age and ugly transformation that it brings about to the
appearance of a human body. The contrast between the child and old man has been beautifully
done. The child is supposed to have descended from the kingdom of souls after drinking the
draught of oblivion. The same child at sixty or more would look like a scarecrow.
6. In the above lines of stanza six, the poet emphasizes the destructive ravages of time. The poet
has already dealt with the loss of a woman’s beauty that in old has been imagined with
hollow cheeks. He also has dwelt upon a little child growing in course of time, into an aged
man, a transition which would fill any mother’s heart with dismay and despair.

Here the poet proceeds to speak of some great philosophers of the world. He begins with Plato’s
view of nature with reference to his theory of ghostly forms. Then he talks about Aristotle’s
Cosmology. A king of kings is Aristotle’s Prime Mover or God, the taws or marbles would be
the concentric spheres, which constituted the world and to which the Prime Mover was believed
to give impetus or movements. The reference is playful and ironic and also exact in saying that
the taws or celestial spheres were placed against the bottom of the Prime Mover since he has
turned away from all Nature and wholly engaged in eternal thought about Himself. The poet then
proceeds to refer to philosopher Pythagoras who believed in the music of the spheres. Briefly
put, Plato located reality in unnatural ghostly forms; Aristotle located it in Nature, and
Pythagoras discovered it in art. But what is the net result in each case? In his old age, each one of
these philosophers became a scarecrow. Thus this stanza emphasizes the destructive ravages of
time.

7. The seventh stanza of the poem establishes similarity between nuns and mothers, as both break hearts.
Nuns worship the images of saints, Virgin Mary and Christ. Mothers worship their children. The
images in a church are marble or bronze images which wear an expression of peace and tranquility.
The images worshipped by mothers are those of living human beings subject to all the excitements
and agitations of life. But the images made of marble or bronze also break the hearts of heir
worshippers. Sons break the hearts of their mothers by growing aged and weak. In this case, it is the
change from childhood to old age that breaks hearts. But the stone images break hearts or cause grief
and pain to their worshippers because of a lack of change. The stone images have, after all, no life in
them, and the expressions of their faces are fixed and unchanging. Here the poet addresses the images
of all kinds of lovers, pious nuns and affectionate mothers to say that all these images represent divine
glory. These presences (or images) are regarded by the poet as self-created mockers of human
sentiment.
8. In this concluding stanza, the poet says that labor turns meaningful when the opposites are fused into
an organity. The opposites are the changing images such as young girls and young boys and the
unchanging images are such as the stone statues. Both, ‘change’ and ‘lack of change’ mock and
torment humanity. ‘Blossoming’ (flowering) and ‘dancing’ can be seen only in terms of the total
organism. The chestnut tree is neither the leaf, nor the blossom, nor the trunk; it is the combination of
all these. The essence of the chestnut, the “great-rooted blossomer’, is not to be found in any single
part of it, its essence is to be found in the trees as a whole. Similarly, we cannot separate the dancing
movements of a human body from the dancer. The dancer and her dancing movements are not
separable.
Among School Children by William Butler Yeats: Critical Appreciation

Among School Children is one of Yeats' later poems and focuses on human potential, how we as
creative beings can work towards a unity of body and soul to fulfil that potential.

 The poem deals with several major issues: contrasting youth and old age, school work and life
wisdom, love and physical pain, intellect and artistic expression.
 Overall, the theme is that of essential change, how a person deals with the passage of time,
desire, ideals and how that person works towards harmony and union.
 The first five stanzas explore youth, old age and love from a personal perspective; the latter
three becoming more impersonal as the speaker attempts to reach a unifying vision.
 Each stanza is a progressive step towards what is ultimately a question concerning expression
and complete harmony of a human life.
 The ottava rima form in this poem works to create a sense of unity, but the mix of full and
imperfect rhyme isn't fully tuned to this ideal. Note that the first 6 stanzas are complete within
themselves, end stopped or given a question mark; each is a separate topic but gradually they
build up to stanzas 7 & 8 which are connected by semi-colon - the last stanza freeing the
speaker from cycles of toil and intellectual disappointment.
In 1922 Yeats became a senator in the Irish Free State parliament and part of his remit was to sit on
an educational committee and investigate schools. The Irish Catholic Church ran many of them and
it was on such an official visit in 1926 to St Otteran's in Waterford, run by the Sisters of Mercy, that
Yeats had the idea for this poem.
In a diary entry for March 26th 1926 he wrote :

'School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfil their
own dreams or even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never
happens.'

Among School Children is one of several poems Yeats wrote dealing with the relationship of body to
soul. Other poems include To A Child Dancing in the Wind, 1919, The Mask, Ego Dominus Tuus,
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes, A Crazed Girl, A Dialogue of Self and Soul.

Among School Children which was inspired by the poet’s visit to a convent school, possess the
problem of aging and sets forth his philosophy of organic wholeness and unity of existence. When
the poet as a senator visits the school, he looks at the children and meditates on aging.
This mediation gradually develops into a philosophy which advocates the unity between past and the
present, between man and his memories, between transcendental and physical, between passion
and spirituality, and between body and soul for the fullness of existence or for the unity of existence.

The first stanza describes the convent school. It begins with the simplicity of school children. There
is a nun and she is visited by the poet to know about the children. There are little girls who remind
him of Maude Gonne. Problem of aging is put forward when he imagines of Maude Gonne to whom
once he loved. He accepts the reality of aging. Fullness of existence (organic whole) is possible
when there is a combination between childhood and aging.
The poet looking at a child starts meditating on his past in the second stanza. The child evokes in
him the image of Maude Gonne as a child. He remembers that day when Maude Gonne complained
him about certain things that caused some bitter feelings inside her. This stanza of the poem implies
an association between man and his memory which later on becomes a part of Yeats’s philosophy of
unity of existence. Moreover, the memory of childhood implies the unity between two different stages
of life: childhood and old age. Yeats draws Plato’s parable which too is related to this philosophy of
unity. Plato’s parable states that at the time of origin, human being was one. But fearful of the power
of human being Zeus cut human into two halves. From then onwards, for the unity of existence, one
half looks for the other.

The third stanza continues with the memories of Maude Gonne. Finding her image in a child
standing before him the poet becomes passionate. The striking theme in this stanza is the
confessional mode. It is shown by these lines, “and thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands
before me as a living child.” In which the poet to the surprise of the reader confesses the intensity of
the passion inside his heart. As a public man he is supposed to behave on practical ground, but he
cannot dominate his instinct and seems to be dominated by bodily desire.

The fourth stanza posits the problems of aging when the poet meditates on the present image of
Maude Gonne as an old woman. The contrast between the past image of Maude Gonne and her
present image brings the problem of aging the fore. The poet sees loss of physical beauty and
turning of the beauty into some kind of shadowy mess. The poet with reference to painter and
painting intensifies the theme of aging. The same problem of aging is repeated in the fifth stanza too,
evoking motherhood, birth and old age. Yeats puts a question if the mother thinks that one day the
child over which she pours much of her love and affection will turn into an old man like the poet
himself.

Yeats brings the reference of transcendental philosophy of Plato, realistic manners of Aristotle, and
the mythical existence of Pythagoras. In his analysis of philosophy of different levels he finds
philosophy superficial because it fails to prevent the growing age. Mother’s solution centers on her
expression of love and affection whereas nun’s includes worshipping idols of the immortals of gods,
but both solutions are not in fact solutions. Neither passion (beloved) nor piety (nun) nor affection
(mother) can prevent the growing age.

Very importantly the poet revolves around this own philosophy of existence in the last stanza. The
poet now seems less concerned with how to prevent growing age than with how to achieve unity of
existence. After observing insufficient labor of philosophy, mother, and nun he puts forward unity
between body and soul as the best medium to realize the fullness. The age old poetic themes of
innocence versus experience, naiveté versus wisdom, and youth versus age permeate every stanza.
The poet proposes his own solution; one must accept reality for what it is, at once changing and
changeless but always unified. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, just as the chestnut tree
cannot be divided into leaf, blossom and bole separately, but all three put together in a larger whole.
In the same manner, in the art of dancer as dancer cannot be separated from the dance, in human
existence body and soul cannot be separated. The fullness of existence of chestnut tree is a joint
effort of leaf, blossom and bole. The existence of art of dance depends on both dancer and the
dance, the human existence requires unity between body and soul. Mind cannot be attributed the
fixed location of the body. The imagination which operates in the poem is omnivorous because of its
meditation on diverse events which are evoked from the poet’s past. The events in the poem such
as reflection after reflection create an image of a kaleidoscope.