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The Full Text of “Among School Children”
I
1I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
2A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
3The children learn to cipher and to sing,
4To study reading-books and history,
5To cut and sew, be neat in everything
6In the best modern way—the children's eyes
7In momentary wonder stare upon
8A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
9I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
10Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
11Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
12That changed some childish day to tragedy—
13Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
14Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
15Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
16Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
17And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
18I look upon one child or t'other there
19And wonder if she stood so at that age—
20For even daughters of the swan can share
21Something of every paddler's heritage—
22And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
23And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
24She stands before me as a living child.
IV
25Her present image floats into the mind—
26Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
27Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
28And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
29And I though never of Ledaean kind
30Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
31Better to smile on all that smile, and show
32There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
33What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
34Honey of generation had betrayed,
35And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
36As recollection or the drug decide,
37Would think her son, did she but see that shape
38With sixty or more winters on its head,
39A compensation for the pang of his birth,
40Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
41Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
42Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
43Solider Aristotle played the taws
44Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
45World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
46Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
47What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
48Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
49Both nuns and mothers worship images,
50But those the candles light are not as those
51That animate a mother's reveries,
52But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
53And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
54That passion, piety or affection knows,
55And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
56O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
VIII
57Labour is blossoming or dancing where
58The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
59Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
60Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
61O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
62Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
63O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
64How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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“Among School Children” Introduction
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William Butler Yeats published "Among School Children" in his famous 1928 collection of poems, The Tower. Yeats was in his sixties at the time and (like the speaker in this poem) served as an Irish senator whose responsibilities included inspecting public schools. In the poem, the speaker's visit to one such school prompts him to reflect on old age, youth, beauty, and change. Although old age brings a decline from the beauty and freshness of youth, the speaker comes to see life as a harmonious whole—meaning that every moment has its own pleasures and rewards.
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“Among School Children” Summary
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I
I ask the teacher questions as I walk around the classroom. The teacher, who is a nice old nun wearing a white hood as part of her uniform, answers my question. The young students are learning to do math and to sing, to read and to study books about history, to cut and sew clothing, and to generally be tidy in the most up-to-date way. As I walk, the children look at me with temporary astonishment, because I'm a smiling, 60-year old politician.
II
Meanwhile, I daydream about a woman who had a body as beautiful as the mythological Leda. I remember a moment when this woman was bent over the fire as she told me a story about some harsh scolding she received, or some other similar event that would seem negligible to an adult but which caused a child's day to be filled with sorrow. And as she told me this story, I felt as if our two personalities merged into a single orb of understanding born of sympathy. Or to put it another way, and change the story that the philosopher Plato tells, it was as if we become the yolk and white of a single egg.
III.
Thinking about this woman's story of sadness or anger, I look at this or that child and wonder if the woman I'm thinking of stood like these children when she was their age. After all, even the half-god daughters of Leda and Zeus (who took the form of a swan when he raped Leda) can share some traits with common people, just as all swans share some similarities. I also wonder if the woman had the same color in her cheek or hair as some of these children do. Suddenly, my heart is filled with excitement: one of these children is the spitting image of her.
IV.
Now I think about how this woman looks these days. Did an Italian Renaissance painter craft her face? In her old age, her cheeks are so gaunt it looks like she drinks only air and eats only shadow. And though I was never as beautiful as a character from mythology, I was pretty enough once. But enough of these thoughts. I should concentrate on the present moment, smile at these children smiling at me. I should show that them though I look like an old scarecrow, I'm a kindly one.
V.
Imagine a young mother with a baby on her lap. This baby has drunk the "honey of generation" in its mother's milk, a mythological drug that will cause the baby to forget its existence as a soul in heaven before it was born. The child must either fall asleep or cry out and try to resist the drug—either to remember its life in heaven or to forget. Would such a mother would think that her son—if she could see him with white hair at more than 60 years old—was worth the pain of childbirth, or all the anxiety of raising him and sending him out into the world?
VI.
The philosopher Plato thought that visible reality was like the foam of wave, while the true nature of the world was what lay beneath that wave: an unchanging realm of abstract truths. On the other hand, the philosopher Aristotle believed that physical objects were what was most real. As tutor to the famous conqueror Alexander the Great, Aristotle would punish the young Alexander by spanking him with a strap of leather. Meanwhile, world-famous Pythagoras, who supposedly had a thigh made of gold, claimed that the movement of stars in the sky created music (which the Muses, goddesses of poetic inspiration, overheard). Pythagoras then played this music on musical instruments. But this music, and all these theories, only amount to this: a raggedy scarecrow.
VII.
Both nuns and moms worship things they can see. But while nuns worship paintings or statues of saints by candlelight, mothers worship their living children. For nuns, religious sculptures made of marble or bronze have a sort of aloofness to them. Yet these statues can also affect people deeply. Oh mysterious beings present in such art, which humans recognize through passion, religious intensity, or love, and which symbolize all the beauty of heaven. Oh such beings are immortal, they created themselves, and they seem to make fun of how the activities of humans are so full of change, death, and interdependence.
VII.
Good work is when people bloom or dance without hurting their bodies in order to please their minds, and where beautiful things don't need suffering in order to be created, and when gaining wisdom doesn't require ceaseless toil all through the night. Oh chestnut tree, with your powerful roots and beautiful flowers, are you your leaves, your flowers, or your trunk? Oh dancing body, oh eyes filled with pleasure, how can we separate a dance from the person dancing it?
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“Among School Children” Themes
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Life as Continual Movement and Change
As the elderly speaker of “Among School Children” contemplates life, he begins to understand that there is beauty in life’s process: in the ongoing “blossoming” of the here and now. Life isn’t some static product, in other words, but rather a kind of continual movement from one moment to the next. Change (including the change entailed by growing older) is inseparable from life itself.
In the poem’s famous final line, the speaker asks, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” A dance just is the motions of a dancer, and someone is a dancer only when they’re dancing. Dancer and dance are thus inseparable. In the same way, people are inseparable from the lives they live. (This line also might suggest that people are what they do—that their actions, their "dancer's steps,"create their identity.)
A dance isn’t some stony, remote statue, either. It’s an art made of fleeting movements; it’s there, and then it’s gone. And that, the speaker suggests, is what the beauty of life is—not its stillness, but rather its motion and change. Life is beautiful because it's constantly shifting (and, the poem implies, because it eventually ends).
The speaker explores this idea further by mentioning the parts of a chestnut tree: the “leaf,” “blossom,” and “bole” (trunk). Just as a tree is composed of all these parts, a human life is composed of all its phases, from childhood to old age. And since all of life is part of this process of growth and change, if follows that even old age—a phase the speaker laments at first—can bring its own kind of satisfaction and “blossoming”; if life is a process like a dance, then the end is no less beautiful than the beginning. The speaker ultimately suggests that life’s beauty is found not in isolated moments or unchanging forms, but in the continuous movement of life as a whole.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Innocence vs. Experience
In “Among School Children,” the speaker—an 60-something senator visiting a school—feels the intense contrast between life as an old man and life as a young person. Old age, this speaker feels, is a decline from the beauty and freshness of youth. Yet he also comes to understand that, while youth has the advantage of innocent loveliness, experience brings with it invaluable wisdom and knowledge.
The poem begins with the speaker discussing his acute awareness of his old age as he visits young children. The speaker watches as the schoolchildren stare at him “In momentary wonder.” He can tell that he seems to them like some strange creature—almost like a member of a different species. That difference isn’t just because he’s an impressive adult with an important job, but also because his body is so different from theirs: he’s become an “old scarecrow,” a decrepit, raggedy figure. In comparison, the children are vibrant and full of life as they learn to read, sing, and sew.
The speaker emphasizes that old age is a phase of life distinct from youth not just physically but also mentally. But this, the speaker says, is actually one of the good things about old age: it leads to wisdom. For instance, while the children are busy learning how to read and sew, the speaker is occupied by memories of that beautiful woman, thoughts of sacred art, and philosophical theories. In other words, the speaker has the mind of an adult, which is distinct from the mind of a child. In this sense, age is not all decay. As an old man, the speaker has a wealth of learning, experience, and wisdom at his disposal.
For the speaker, age beats down the body and wears away beauty. Walking among children, the speaker becomes all the more conscious of this decay. However, old age also has its strengths. Ultimately, the speakers sees age and youth as aspects of life with their own unique virtues and powers.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Accepting the Reality of Aging and Decay
One of the speaker’s guiding lights is the search for the "ideal," or the most beautiful and permanent form of something. Yet reality always falls short of this ideal, as even great beauty fades and, the poem suggests, the ravages of time come for everyone. To be alive is to grow old and fade away, in other words; aging and decay are simply part of being human, and the speaker suggests that anyone who wants to live fully must embrace these earthly realities.
For the speaker, aging entails an inevitable loss of beauty. While the speaker “Had pretty plumage once,” for instance (meaning he was a good-looking young man), now his handsome youth is long gone. The speaker also spends part of the poem thinking back on the former beauty of a woman he loved. Despite remembering her as akin to a mythological goddess, she has grown “Hollow of cheek” and withered. She, like the speaker, looks ravaged by time, having proven just as vulnerable to mortality as he. Her erotic, youthful beauty has vanished, and the speaker's idealization of her former self does nothing to preserve her.
These thoughts of ideal beauties leads the speaker to thoughts of to Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, three ancient Greek thinkers who presented theories about the ideal form of things. Plato, for instance, argued that an abstract realm exists where the truest and purest forms live. Yet even the philosophers of the ideal eventually became “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird”: they too were human, subject to mortality and decay just like everyone else. No amount of philosophizing could stop this.
Finally, the speaker contrasts the “marble or a bronze repose” of religious sculptures with actual human beings. These sculptures are aloof, unchanging, inaccessible, the speaker argues. Their sacred, otherworldly beauty allows them to “break hearts,” or affect people deeply, yet such sculptures are also “mockers of man’s enterprise.” In other words, this stony and unchanging religious art seems to look on the constant motion of human activity as if mocking it. Life here on earth can never achieve the everlasting ideal represent by such religious art.
At the end of the poem, the speaker comes to term with the realities of aging through images of trees growing and dancers dancing. These images present beauty as something takes shape through time and change—through motion and growth—rather than trying to stand up against it. A life fully lived, the speaker finally concludes, must embrace the reality of development and change rather than forever fruitlessly seeking a frozen, statuesque ideal.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Among School Children”
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Before Line 1, Lines 1-6
I
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 poem begins with the speaker on a visit to a public school. In real life, Yeats was an Irish senator who did in fact have to make such visits to schools. As a result, although the speaker isn't explicitly Yeats himself, there is a close connection between the two.
The speaker walks through a classroom, questioning the teacher, who is a nun. This is a convent school—in Ireland, public schools and religion were closely linked, so that it was common for there to be classes taught by nuns. The speaker sees children being taught "to cipher," or do arithmetic, as well as to sing, study history, and sew. These lines set the scene for the poem. As the poem moves on, this scene will provide a contrast to the drift of the speaker's thoughts.
"Among School Children" is written in a loose iambic pentameter (a meter in which each line as five feet in a da-DUM rhythm), as is characteristic of Yeats's poetry. The meter is loose in that many of the lines deviate from this exact pattern. Yeats does this on purpose, as it gives the poem the feeling of spoken language as well as a distinct texture. Rather than feeling entirely predictable and smooth, there's a thorny, knotty texture to the poem. This texture captures the feel of the speaker's own thoughts, doubts, concerns, aspirations, and observations.
Here, for instance, is the first line:
I walk | through the | long school- | room ques- | tioning;
The uneven rhythm of this line suggests a kind of awkwardness to the speaker. Contrast this highly irregular line with the speaker's description of the students:
To cut | and sew, | be neat | in ev- | erything
Here, the perfect iambic pentameter of the lines captures the prim and proper activities of the students, who are "neat in everything," contrasting it with the awkward thorniness of the speaker's own internal narration.
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Lines 6-8
the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
Unlock all 383 words of this analysis of Lines 6-8 of “Among School Children,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Between Lines 8-9, Lines 9-12
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— -
Lines 13-16
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. -
Between Lines 16-17, Lines 17-21
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— -
Lines 22-24
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child. -
Between Lines 24-25, Lines 25-28
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? -
Lines 29-32
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. -
Between Lines 32-33, Lines 33-36
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, -
Lines 37-40
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? -
Between Lines 40-41, Lines 41-44
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; -
Lines 45-48
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. -
Between Lines 48-49, Lines 49-52
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. -
Lines 53-56
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; -
Between Lines 56-57, Lines 57-60
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. -
Lines 61-64
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?
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“Among School Children” Symbols
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The Dancer and the Dance
The poem's famous final line asks a rhetorical question: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" The speaker is saying that a dance—a series of movements—and the person making those movements are one. Both the dance and dancer are symbolic here: the dance here represents life, which is a series of moments/actions/events from youth to old age. The dancer is the person living that life—going through the "steps" that life entails. A person can't be separated from their own life.
This relates to another symbol in the poem—that of the chestnut tree mentioned in line 61. The speaker asks the tree, "Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?" The implied answer is that the tree is all of these things at once; the tree isn't something separate from its parts, but rather is all of those parts. In the same way, the actions that make up a life aren't separate from that life. Life is all of those actions, all the steps that the "dancer" goes through.
This connects to the poem's broader idea of life it also as a continual process—a series of ongoing moments that come together to fashion a whole. One can't pluck one moment from this process and call it a life; everything from youth to old form the "dance" of life.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Among School Children” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
In the second half of his career, Yeats moved towards a style of poetry that sounded a bit more like spoken language. As a result, although he still uses alliteration in this poem, Yeats blends it into his speaker's seemingly causal monologue.
The early /k/ and /s/ alliteration provides a good example of how the speaker uses alliteration casually, rather lyrically—that is, as a means of holding the poem's images together rather than creating high-flown poetic beauty:
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,The first alliterative pair of "questioning" and "kind," with those sharp /k/ sounds, subtly evokes the speaker's brief interruption as he questions this nun. The /s/ alliteration in "cipher," "sing," and "study," meanwhile, simply lends a sense of unity to this list of the children's school subjects.
Most of the poem's alliteration function much like the above. One noticeable exception is the final stanza, which is by far the poem's most lyrical. Here, /b/ alliteration flows throughout the stanza, as in these lines:
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,The shift to a more lyrical tone is clearly signaled by the speaker's repetition of "O," an old-fashioned form of the word "Oh," meant to capture a sudden burst of strong emotion. This burst of emotion is conveyed through the strong /b/ sound, which highlights poetic words like "blossom," "body," and "brightening." By repeating this strong sound with poetic words throughout the stanza, the speaker creates a lyrical summary of the poem's many concerns.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Assonance
Unlock all 305 words of this analysis of Assonance in “Among School Children,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Consonance
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Allusion
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Rhetorical Question
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Polyptoton
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Metonymy
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Apostrophe
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Hypotaxis
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Parallelism
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“Among School Children” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Cipher
- Reading-books
- Public man
- Ledaean body
- Reproof
- Natures
- Sympathy
- Plato's parable
- Plato
- Shell
- Fit
- T'other
- Daughters of the Swan
- Paddler's
- Quattrocento
- Mess
- Plumage
- Honey of generation
- Drug
- Pang
- Setting forth
- Spume
- Paradigm
- Solider
- The taws
- Golden-thighed Pythagoras
- Fiddle-stick or strings
- Muses
- Reveries
- Repose
- Presences
- Piety
- Self-born
- Blear-eyed
- Midnight oil
- Bole
Cipher-
Read or do arithmetic.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Among School Children”
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Form
"Among School Children" uses a type of stanza called ottava rima, an eight-line stanza that rhymes ABABABCC. This form was originally developed by early Italian Renaissance poets, who used it for long narrative poems.
In Yeats's hands, however, ottava rima it becomes a means of thinking through different trains of thought one at a time. Instead of telling a story that flows from one stanza to the next, Yeats makes each stanza self-contained. Many of the poem's stanzas begin with a huge leap in subject compared to what has come before.
- For instance, stanza I gives a straightforward description of the speaker's visit to a school, while stanza II begins by describing a woman's body in terms of Greek mythology.
- The leaps between stanzas are further emphasized by the fact that each stanza is numbered and almost all of them end with a period or question mark. As a result, each stanza becomes its own little world.
One reason Yeats may have chosen this form, then, is that it provides just enough room to consider each topic—erotic love, motherhood, religious art, etc.—going into some detail, but not overdoing it.
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Meter
"Among School Children" is written in a very loose iambic pentameter that is characteristic of Yeats. Iambic pentameter has five iambs (feet with a da-DUM rhythm) per line, but the speaker often diverges from this pattern.
The first line is a good example:
I walk | through the | long school- | room ques- | tioning
This line is highly irregular, not only because it deviates quite a bit from the meter, but also because it is the first line of the poem. Traditionally, poets have viewed the first line as an important moment to establish the poem's meter, usually following that meter exactly.
Yeats disregards that tradition here. Instead, he shows off his skill at not following that meter, but establishing a compelling rhythm even so. He continues this way in the second line as well:
A kind | old nun | in a | white hood | replies;
Notice how both lines involves a pyrrhic (da-da) foot followed by a spondee (DUM-DUM). This similarity between lines creates a rhythmic consistency that gives the poem its own unique music and sense of order at the beginning.
One reason that Yeats is considered a Modernist poet, even though he continued to used traditional forms, is that his language grew to have this sort of metrical flexibility. This kind of thing wouldn't fly with Yeats's predecessors—even a radical poet like Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom Yeats greatly admired, was a stickler about meter. Yeats's achievement was that he allowed his meter to mimic everyday speech, creating an almost casual, everyday quality that plays off the traditional forms he continued to use.
As a result, the language in this poem sometimes has a thorny, knotty, sinewy, or even awkward quality to it, which mimics the texture of the speaker's thoughts. The speaker contrasts this awkwardness, to great effect, with the prim and proper world around him:
The chil- | dren learn | to ci- | pher and | to sing,
To stu-| dy rea- | ding-books | and his- | tory,
To cut | and sew, | be neat | in ev- | erythingIn three lines of perfect, unbroken iambic pentameter, the speaker captures a world of children being taught to "be neat in everything." The meter here becomes neat in order to reflect that, contrasting markedly with the loose, untidy meter of the speaker's inner thoughts.
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Rhyme Scheme
Written in a form called ottava rima, the poem sticks to the following rhyme scheme:
ABABABCC
One effect of this rhyme scheme is to create distinctly self-contained stanzas (an effect that's reinforced by the numerals between each stanza). The ABABAB rhymes makes the lines feel interlocked as well, mimicking the tumbling associations of a single train of thought. Then, the CC couplet at the end of the stanza puts a stop to this train of thought, neatly summing up the speaker's thoughts and ending the stanza. As a result, each stanza feels like a process that is seen through to completion.
Although from a bird's eye view this rhyme scheme provides a tidy feel to each stanza, on the ground it is much more complicated because the poem uses lots of slant rhymes and eye rhymes— rhymes like "parable" and "shell," or "it" and "meat"; "age" and "heritage," or "mind" and "wind." These rhymes prevent the rhyme scheme from becoming too predicable and obvious. Many of the rhymes are so unnoticeable they almost disappear, so that at times the poem can feel like conversational blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter).
Often, the off-kilter rhymes mimic the poem's content in some ways. For instance, in stanza V ("What youthful mother [...] Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?"), almost every ABABAB rhyme is a slant rhyme ("escape" and "lap," for example). These uneasy rhymes mimic the infant's "struggle to escape," and the speaker's deep uncertainty, at this point, about whether life is really worth all the trouble. Furthermore, when the speaker does employ full rhymes, often as the CC couplet at the end of a stanza, these full rhymes ring out all the more clearly, as they do in stanza V. This moments provide definite endings to the stanzas, clearly separating one stanza from the next.
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“Among School Children” Speaker
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The speaker of "Among School Children" is usually closely associated with Yeats himself. Especially in the second half of his career, Yeats often wrote about events from his own life. In this poem, the speaker is a "sixty-year-old smiling public man"—a politician—visiting a convent school. In real life, Yeats served as an Irish senator in his 60s and really did have to inspect schools as part of his job. What's more, the woman whom the speaker describes as having "a Ledaean body" is commonly associated with Maud Gonne, a woman Yeats loved hopelessly throughout his life and who was often the subject of his poetry.
That said, it's not necessary to identify the speaker and the woman with Yeats and Gonne completely; the poem is purposefully left vague so that readers can fill in their own experiences and assumptions. All the same, it's good to know these biographical details.
In terms of how the poem works, there are essentially two sides to the speaker's attention: a public side and a private side. The poem begins with the public, as the speaker spends the first stanza describing the classroom in literal terms. After that, though, the speaker's attention quickly shifts to his own private ruminations, and the bulk of the poem is taken up with deeply personal thoughts—not the kinds of things a senator would share with a classroom of children! As the poem progresses, the reader is given a multifaceted snapshot of an aging politician and extremely successful writer, who is just as complex and conflicted as ever.
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“Among School Children” Setting
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"Among School Children" is set in a convent school in Ireland in the 1920s. It was common for classes to be taught by nuns or priests in Ireland. The presence of the nun also leads the speaker to further thoughts about religious art and worship later in the poem.
Although the poem begins with the speaker visiting a public school on official business, most of the poem takes place in his head. He mulls over memories of a beautiful women, summarizes what he knows about Greek philosophy, ponders motherhood, and contemplates the meaning of life—all while he's supposed to be paying attention to a classroom full of children! In this regard, as the speaker's imagination leaps from one subject to the next, the poem's actual, mundane setting always lurks in the background as a stark contrast.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Among School Children”
Literary Context
W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, solidifying his reputation on an international scale: a symbol of Irish culture as well as a master of poetic forms who could bridge the gap between tradition and modernity.
Yeats's career spans the late-Victorian period to the Modernist movement. His early poetry is usually classified as Symbolist, an aesthetic movement that began in France in the 19th century, whose poetry involved using vague and beautiful symbols to evoke feelings of the infinite. During this period, Yeats wrote very lyrical poems about nature, love, and Irish mythology. He greatly admired the English Romantic poets, like Keats and Shelley.
Later, as Yeats grew older, his poetry began to address more worldly affairs, such as politics, current events, and public figures. His language shifted, becoming more subdued and sounding more like spoken language. He still talked about love and relationships, but now turned to his newfound style. This is Yeats's Modernist phase, when "Among School Children" was written.
Modernism was a huge aesthetic movement that lasted from the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Modernists reinvented traditional forms of art or invented their own, redefining what art could depict, and how. Yeats was friends with one of the most influential English-language modernists, Ezra Pound. Pound was a major proponent of free verse, poetry that does not follow a set meter. Pound believed that poets should employ a variety of rhythms in their poems with an ear towards everyday speech, creating an energetic and immediate effect. Although Yeats never adopted free verse, he did use very loose meters that left room for the kinds of rhythmic effects that Pound advocated.
Similarly, Yeats's subjects captured many of the concerns of Modernism. In this poem, for instance, he shows the conflicts between modern life (as exhibited by the "neat" and "modern" schoolchildren) and the spiritual desires of an older generation (as exhibited by the speaker's inner life). And while younger modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound took their poetry to greater experimental lengths, Yeats stood behind them as a poetic elder and major voice in English-language writing. He paved the way for developing poetry based on a strong personal vision and a willingness to continually reinvent oneself in writing.
Historical Context
Early in his life, Yeats was a fervent Irish nationalist—someone who supported Irish independence from England's colonial rule. He believed in elevating Irish culture through retellings of Irish myths and the development of a uniquely Irish playhouse in Dublin. Although he never took part in the violent rebellions against English rule, particularly the Easter Rising of 1916, in his older age he played a prominent role in the political life of the Irish free state by serving as a national senator. One of his roles as senator was inspecting public schools, like the elementary school his speaker visits in this poem.
Another important cultural element in Yeats's life is mysticism and the occult. From the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century, many upper-class people in Europe become interested in occult practices, such as fortune telling, contacting spirits, speaking with the dead, performing alchemical transformations, etc. Yeats was a member of one such occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Throughout his life, he engaged in mystical, magical experiments as a member of this Order. In fact, outside of poetry, these magical studies were the driving force of his life. Much of Yeats's concern about otherworldly beauty, "Presences," etc., in this poem can be connected to his deep interest in mysticism.
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More “Among School Children” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of Yeats's "Among School Children."
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The Yeats Society — Helpful resources from the Yeats Society in Sligo, Ireland.
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Yeats's Passionate Intensity — A review of a large exhibition of Yeats's archive, with details of th tumultuous relationship with Maud Gonne.
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A Biography of Yeats — A good overview of Yeats's life and work from the Poetry Foundation.
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Yeats in the Senate — The Irish Independent provides a brief overview of Yeats's time as an Irish senator.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Butler Yeats
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