Among School Children-Yeats

Poem-

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading books and history,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way—the children's eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.



II


I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy—

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Plato's parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.



III


And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t'other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age—

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler's heritage—

And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.



IV


Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledaean kind

Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.



V


What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

As recollection or the drug decide,

Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?



VI


Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.



VII


Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother's reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts—O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise—

O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;



VIII


Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Description of the poem- (Samsung users please turn on the auto-rotate function if facing cropped text, even after that if you don't get a solution then open this page in google chrome)

A

  1. W. B. Yeats wrote Among School Children in 1926, after his visit in that year to a School perhaps (St Otteren's School)

  2. This poem was inspired by the visit as a 60 years old senator, in the capacity of Inspector of schools.

  3. The poem starts with the person that gradually reaches philosophical heights.

  4. The pastry reaches to the level of a profound poetry of universal appeal and significance.

B

  1. On his visit, he saw the nuns teaching the children to read, write, sew and cut.

  2. The poet moves around the verandah and the classroom.

  3. He was asking several questions to which the old, white hooded dressed nun gave the answer.

  4. The children, especially the poet observe a girl gazing at him in surprise.


  1. In the next stanza, the poet’s thought goes to Maud Gonne.

  2. Maud Gonne was a graceful girl as beautiful as Leda.

  3. She becomes the mother of Nelen.

  4. The Trojan War (15 years) was fought for her.

  5. This is the theme of Homer’s Illiad but Maud Gonne whom the poet-love could not marry her and he anticipated she must have also gone old as him.

  1. The poet shares how both were during their student days.

  2. He recalls how a teacher behaved rudely and how a “trivial event that changed some children's days to tragedy”.

  3. The poet had deep sympathy for her in this incident.

  4. As their nature was the same, they mingled with each other.

  5. But they maintained their individual identity like the yoke and white of the egg.

  6. In the next stanza, the poet comes back to the present, standing in the classroom.

  7. He looks at the little girls one by one, bringing out the similarity of the pain and fear that his Maud has as a little girl.

  8. The poet believed that children of all ages have the same emotions be it Helen of Yesterday or the little children of today in the classroom.


  1. They are like the children of ordinary mortals like the paddlers.

  2. Helen was born of the union of Leda and Swan.

  3. The Swan being Zeus in the guise of the bird.

  1. For a few minutes, the poet is shocked to find that the little girl, in front of him, was the same as his Maud.

  2. Further, in the next moment, the poet realizes that Maud also must have gone old as him.

  3. The poet visualizes her hollow cheek.

  4. She has gone very thin.

  5. He imagined her as the 15th-century portrait made by Italian Painter, who had Painted an old woman with the hallow check.

  6. The poet then thinks of himself that once he was also young.

  7. Now he is old and is like a scarecrow.

  8. But even then he needs to be cheerful. 

  9. Here the poet proceeds to paint the picture of a child behaving in its childish pranks shrinking, sleeping and trying to escape.

  10. The poet says that the same child after 60 years would go old with hollow cheeks.


  1. The poet strikes, saying had the mother visualized the child in the cradle as an old man with hollow cheeks.

  2. Would she have taken all the pains to nurture him?

  3. Would not she feel that all the pain was useless?

  1. The poet dwells upon the curse of the age.

  2. The contrast between old age and the child is beautifully done.

  3. The child seems to have descended to heaven drinking the drought of oblivion.

  4. That he would also grow old.

  5. In the next stanza, the poet proceeds to speak of the great philosophers.

  6. He begins with Plato’s view with his reference of ghostly forms.

  7. Then he talks of Aristotle’s cosmology.

  8. Here the poet gives an ironic reference.

  9. The Taws or the Celestial Spherer were placed against the bottom of the moves.

  10. So, he turned away from nature wholly engaged in eternal thoughts.

  11. The next philosopher is Pythagoras.

  12. He believed in the music of the spheres thus we can say that-

  1. Plato located unnaturally ghost 

  2. Aristotle is located in nature.

  3. Pythagoras discovered it in the act.

  1. At the end of the stanza, the poet says but what use is of these?

  2. All ended in old age. This is the destructive ravages of time.

  3. In the seventh stanza, the poet compares the nuns and mothers.

  4. Nuns worship the bronze images but do the images respond?

  5. The same is with the mothers. Their excitement and desire are all broken by their sons.

  6. In the concluding stanza, the poet says that labour turned fruitful.

  7. The opposites are fused into organity.

  8. The ‘change’ and ‘no change’ mock humanity.

  9. ‘Blossoming’ and ‘dancing’ can be seen only in organisms.

  10. The chestnut is not found in a single part.