In the winter of 1926, William Butler Yeats visited a convent school in his official capacity as an Irish senator. During the visit, a nun guided him through a classroom of young students. The result of the visit produced a great philosophical poem, “Among School Children.” In this poignant, beautiful, and also difficult poem, Yeats acknowledges all the heartache, and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” but also ultimately envisions a means to counter this life’s vicissitudes.
Among School Children
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 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 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 by a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Soldier 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 heaven glory symbolize –
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;
VIII
Labor 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?
Yeats begins his poem by describing his visit to a classroom of young children in stanza I. As he strolls among the students he is told by the nun accompanying him that the children are learning to do math, to sing, to read and to study history. The children are curious and “stare upon” him, and it is here that Yeats introduces a contrast between youth and old age, a central theme in the poem. In stanza II, this direct contrast spurs his imagination to remember a specific conversation he had years ago with Maud Gonne, (Yeats’s unrequited love who became his poetic muse from the time they met.) Yeats’s thoughts flow into a romantic reverie where he dreams of Gonne's youthful beauty, “a Ledaean body,” comparing her to Helen of Troy, and of an “event” that caused her pain–“a harsh reproof, or trivial event/That changed some childish day to tragedy.” The sympathy he felt for her in that moment moved Yeats to envision them as two beings blended into one: “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.”
In stanza III, his attention returns briefly to the classroom, but again an image of Gonne, this time as a young child, possesses Yeats’s mind. As he moves to stanza IV, he imagines her as she was at this stage of their lives, her face now timeworn, “Hollow of cheek as though it [she] drank the wind.” He recollects how he too once was youthfully handsome, “pretty plumage once,” though like Maude he has aged well past youth perceiving himself in the image of an “old scarecrow.” The depictions of beauty “Ledaean kind,” youth, the five repetitions in some form of the word children, and old age, “Hollow of cheek,” “old scarecrow,” remain discreet and, most importantly, irreconcilable elements existing as they do in the arc of Time in this half of the poem. Though Yeats seems undisturbed by his present physical state of life at the end of stanza IV, “comfortable old scarecrow,” he proceeds in the second half of the poem to wonder how the effect of time invariably bears on the human spirit and how humans respond to it.
The contrasting images between youth and his old age kindle the philosophical musings that occupy the rest of the poem. In stanza V, he wonders whether a young mother would “think” the pain of childbirth worth it if she could see her son old, “With sixty or more winter on its head,” Of course, Yeats sees himself in this image. Also within this stanza is Plato’s theory that before birth the soul exists in a prefect “Platonic” realm. Upon birth, the soul, unless it drinks the “drug” of forgetfulness, immediately yearns to return to that spiritual world where it is not fastened to the human body and therefore not subject to all the suffering physical existence entails.
In stanza VI, Yeats cites three “great philosophers,” Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, but concludes that their “knowledge” is but “Old clothes upon a stick to scare a bird.” This image of a scarecrow echoes, but also contrasts with, the last line in stanza IV. Yeats is the “comfortable…old scarecrow” in that line; the three philosophers are “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.” Why has Yeats reduced these foundational philosophers, and their ideas, to trivial uselessness? Why does he ridicule them?
In Stanza VII he observes that both nuns and mothers worship images. The images nuns adore are cast in marble or bronze; mothers cherish memories of their children. Though marble and bronze seem to “repose” beyond the touch of time, continuing to be worshiped after the nuns are gone, Yeats concludes that “they too break hearts,” and that they are illusions produced by “man’s enterprise” and worthy of little more than mockery. Why can’t the solidity of religious “marble” and “bronze” statues solace the ache time and mortality impose?
What should be clear by this point in the poem is Yeats’s images and allusions are his attempt to find the balance between the painful dissonance between youth and age. Until now, Yeats uncovers only irreconcilable dichotomies. Finally, in stanza VIII, he stops looking and instead creates an aesthetic salvation. First, he firmly rejects religion, love, and philosophy as means to transcend the inevitability of aging: “Labor is blossoming or dancing where/The body is bruised to pleasure soul,/Nor beauty born out of its own despair./Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.” None of these three can enable him to serenely endure the momentum of time. Unable to provide answers to the endless question “Why,” Yeats instead offers the “How” through three beautifully framed rhetorical questions:
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?
The image of the chestnut tree with its “leaf,” “blossom,” or “bole,” conveys a unity of being. For Yeats, it is the realization that life is simultaneously what one is at present and all the accumulated experiences leading to each moment in time. Nothing less can measure adequately the nature of one’s being. Moreover, the value or meaning of life is determined by how one lives life. One cannot control the “music,” but one can choose how one dances to it and thus become the “dancer” who creates the choreography of the “dance.”
It is rather extraordinary the way Yeats takes a simple official visit to a school and transforms it into a profound and poetic meditation on youth, age, and mortality. In each stanza, one can feel the despair creeping into Yeats’s mind and observe each move and countermove he attempts to avert his gaze from that painful sight. The reader too must feel in the pit of the stomach that gnawing angst the shadow of the scarecrow throws across the page. Fortunately, relief arrives in the final stanza and a sense of tranquility settles into the mind.