Analysis Of Yeats Among School Children

Poetry often supplies the occasion for self-reflection and meditation. Yeats Among School Children manages to puzzle -yet at the same time- enthuse writers and average disciples alike. Although the stanzas –which contain many allusions, extensions and ciphers- construct a reverie, not a word of Among the School Children lends to neither an awkward nor superfluous reading. During the course of the poem, the speaker ruminates on the complexities of life, the unpredictability of love and the paradox of artistic ability. While in a classroom filled with young students, the speaker realizes that the desired but very elusive unity of being especially in regards to the creator and the creation. Though at first he is dubious about his work, through many allusions and comparison, the speaker analyses the importance of seeing the beauty of the whole simultaneously with its components. As he ages, he realizes that he is a part of whatever he creates. The body is not sacrificed to the soul; the speaker discovers his worth through the entirety of life not just its sectional spheres.

The first and second stanza effectively sets up the poem; as an old man wanders amongst children he feels detached from them because of both his experience and age. The opening stanza commences with a description of the speaker’s location, “ I walk through the long school room” (1). It continues in an epic sentence ending with a period just before the second stanza. The speaker walks down the hall of a school with a nun as his guide; symbolically, the school represents the speaker’s life. As he wanders through the rooms and corners of the hall, he also navigates the episodes of his own life. The nun mentions that the children learn to cipher and read “in a modern...

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...or the bole” (64). He realizes that existence is much like the chestnut composed of three things; he cannot survive through individual miserable moments alone-life should be viewed and appreciated as a whole. Though his body has been tortured to please his soul, he can still find happiness in life in its entirety. The creator and the creation are in indissoluble unity.

In essence, the poem is composed of eight extensive sentences. That Yeats writes the poem in a consistent abababcc (Ottava Rima) rhyme scheme shows how mundane and dreary life has become for the speaker. Through the contrast of the speaker’s life with that of youthful children, Yeats shows the different stages of life. By reflecting life and obsessing over the individual stages, the speaker beings to understand that the importance of appreciating the whole as neither can exist without the other.