Among School Children

The first stanza of “Among School Children” opens with an accessible, conversational tone that’s unusual for Yeats’s work, and an effective contrast to the more multi-layered stanzas as the poem progresses. The poet, an aging politician, walks through a girls’ school asking questions of the nuns who work there. He oversees the children’s work as they learn in “the best modern way” (Line 6); this is a reference to the Montessori method which had been recently implemented in this school and others like it. The stanza closes with the images of a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” (Line 8), showing the contrast between the poet’s age and the children’s youth. Despite the age difference, however, the scene is a positive one; the nun is kind and the poet smiles, giving us a warm and lighthearted atmosphere as the poem begins.

In the second stanza the politician’s mind begins to wander as he remembers the woman he loves—not as she is now, but when they were young and she had a body as beautiful as Leda’s from the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, a story which Yeats also visited in more of his work. He listened to her tell him an anecdote from her school days in a classroom much like the one the poet stands in now; and, in sympathizing, joined together in commiseration for the small tragedies of childhood. Yeats uses the symbol of the egg to illustrate how perfectly they fit together, and how interdependent they are as two separate souls—one cannot exist without the other to sustain it.

In the third stanza, the poet continues his train of thought but returns to the scene before him. He considers the children in the room, who exist in equally tragic and beautiful worlds of their own, and he begins to search for the woman he loves in the girls’ faces. He marks one with a similar coloring and, caught between the scene in front of him and the scene of his memory, believes for just one heartbeat where his “heart is driven wild” (Line 23) that he has found her.

Now he thinks of his love as she is in that moment, somewhere far away and as aged and wizened as he is. He compares her to a “Quattrocento” (Line 26) Italian renaissance painting and describes her as a figure who drinks wind and eats shadows—a powerful image reminiscent of dark figures from Irish myth, such as the Morrigan. This imagery suggests that even though she is undeniably old and no longer his Helen of Troy, she will never be weak. The poet goes on to say that while he could not compare with her otherworldly beauty, he was attractive himself—but, before he can descend into vanity, he shakes himself back into the present moment and shows the children before him that there is no shame in growing up.

In the fifth stanza, Yeats moves from children to the idea of mothers—not his own as she is now, but as she and many like her may have been immediately after birthing their children. Here, “honey” (Line 34) is a reference to the Greek philosopher Porphyry’s essay, “The Cave of the Nymphs,” in which honey dissolves the child’s memories of their existence before this one. The poet questions how the pain and exhaustion of raising a child and setting them loose into the world compares with the adult they grow to become. It is worth remembering here that birthing and raising children in the time of Yeats’ childhood would have been an altogether riskier matter than it is today, with many mothers dying in childbirth. The questions are left open for the reader to consider.

With these deep and irresolvable questions in mind, the poet shifts to Greek philosophy. He speaks of Plato, known well for his explorations of the natural world; Aristotle, famous for tutoring Alexander the Great and beating him when he failed to learn his lessons well enough; and Pythagoras, who was believed to have thighs of gold as proof of his incarnation from the god Apollo. Pythagoras was said to have a deep innate understanding of music and could even hear music of the heavens—the same music that reached the ears of the muses themselves. And yet, despite all their studies and big ideas and worldly wisdom, each of these great philosophers became old scarecrows just like the speaker—their learning could not hold back the ravages of time.

In the seventh stanza, Yeats moves from the lofty ideals of the philosophers back to the grounded ideals of mothers, comparing them to nuns in their parallel practices of worship. While nuns direct their worship towards inanimate figures, such as an idol of Jesus or the Holy Mother, mothers of men worship their children; both practices, the poet argues, lead to inevitable heartbreak as neither idol can ever truly live up to its expectation. And perhaps, in some way, the nuns and mothers are to blame for piling such expectation on those they love.

As the poem closes on the final stanza, it moves from the heart and spirit into the body and physical labor. Yeats argues that with such high expectation heaped upon an individual in a lifetime, one often sacrifices pleasure and well-being for the sake of progress; however, this becomes counterproductive in the end, as the best work comes when the “body is not bruised to pleasure soul” (Line 58). He speaks of the importance of balance—what, today, one might call taking care of one’s mental health to function at one’s best. The closing of the poem reminds the reader that one’s body, mind, and spirit are all interconnected and cannot exist separately of each other, and that one can only be whole when all of these pieces exist in harmony.