Among School Children

by William Butler Yeats

THEMES AND MEANINGS

The central themes of “Among School Children” are best exemplified in the central
action: A sixty-year-old official is visiting with elementary school children. The
age-old poetic themes of innocence versus experience, naïveté versus wisdom, and
youth versus age permeate every stanza of the poem.

Yeats, who in his youthful work frequently dealt with incidents of passing and
loss, virtually became obsessed with those themes as he became older and faced his
own mortality in more real, less abstract terms. By this point in his career, Yeats
was examining the consequences and effects of time’s passage not only on the human
body but also on the human spirit—both for the individual and for the race as a
whole—invariably basing his meditations on personal experience.

In Yeats’s hands, these timeless themes take on a profound significance, because

while he views human life as tragic, his vision is not nihilistic. He never does
actually enunciate what purpose human life may serve, but he does believe that
there is a purpose. “Among School Children” illustrates how the individual might
frustrate that purpose by imagining either that he is the master of his own destiny
or that there is no such thing as destiny.

Maud Gonne serves as a prime example of this frustration of purpose. The poet, who
is condemned to remember the brightness and promise of her youth, must live with
the meaningless fruits of her actions now that the heartbreak and frustrations of
her commitment to revolutionary Irish political causes have taken their toll both
on herself and others. By cutting her fulfillment short, she has cut all the rest
of humankind short.

Nor will Yeats exclude himself and others from the same condemnation. All fail in
their choices and actions to face squarely the one insurmountable reality: Flesh
ages, spirits flag, and human dreams wither. He thus accuses himself of having
given up or given in (“Ihad pretty plumage once” but now am “a comfortable kind of
old scarecrow”) and accuses nuns and mothers, as much as the Helens and Mauds of
the world, of betraying the innocent, childlike spirit that fosters dreams and
compels human choices.

People unwittingly create false images of what it is to be human, thereby creating

false hopes and expectations. Yeats suggests that since there is no choice but to
move forward, one should imagine the fullness of each moment as having an
inextricable harmony with all others. Life is like a dance that does exist
independent of a dancer but has no shape or form without the dancers.
What literary devices has Yeats used in "Among School Children," stanzas 4-8?
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D. REYNOLDS
| CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
Literary devices enhance the message a poet is trying to convey. Overall, Yeats
uses the literary device of ottava rima (eight-line stanzas) with a rhyme scheme of
abababcc to carefully structure his poem. Some literary devices that Yeats uses
specifically in stanzas four through eight include alliteration, imagery, allusion,
apostrophe, and rhetorical questions.

In alliteration, words that begin with the same consonant are placed close
together. This puts the emphasis on certain words and adds a pleasing sense of
rhythm to a verse. Some examples of alliteration in these stanzas are "finger
fashion" in stanza four, "Fingered upon a fiddle-stick" in stanza six, and in
stanza eight, the repeated "b" sounds in:

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom.
Imagery is description using the five senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and
touch. Some examples are "hollow of cheek," "youthful mother," and "old clothes
upon old sticks to scare a bird." All of these are visual images we can picture
with our mind's eye.

The poem is full of allusions, which are references to other literature or to

events or people outside the poem. Yeats' speaker refers both to his beloved, Maud
Gonne, now aged, and Leda, the beautiful swan raped by Zeus when he alludes to
"pretty plumage once." The speaker also alludes to three Greek philosophers with
very different views of life in stanza six: Plato, who was more interested in
ideals that worldly reality, Aristotle, who was a realist, and Pythagoras, who
found beauty in what he believed was the music of spheres.

Apostrophe is addressing an inanimate object or person who is absent. Yeats, uses

this device in stanza eight when he addresses the chesnut tree: "O chestnut
tree ..." You can find other places that begin with "O," which are examples of
apostrophe. Directly addressing an object brings a sense of immediacy or urgency.

Finally, Yeats ends the poem with rhetorical questions, such as the famous "How can
we know the dancer from the dance?" The point the speaker is making is that we are
known by what we do, and the two can't be separated. We are also known as the sum
of our parts, as when the chestnut tree is asked: "Are you the leaf, the blossom or
the bole?" Of course, it is all of these together.
Explain the poetic devices in "Among School Children."
In "Among School Children," Yeats uses a variety of poetic devices, including
classical allusions, symbolism, juxtaposition, and metaphors.

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MARIETTA SADLER
| CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
In the second stanza of the poem, Yeats alludes to the classical Greek myth of Leda
and the swan. In this story, the Greek god Zeus took the form of a swan and, in
that form, seduced and raped a princess named Leda. The child born of the rape was
Helen of Troy, who has since become famous for her supposedly great beauty.

When the speaker says, in stanza 2, "I dream of a Ledaean body," he means that he
dreams about great beauty. The "Ledaean body" is a reference to the beauty of Leda
and also to the beauty of Helen, who was born of Leda. This classical allusion
poses complicated ideas about beauty. Indeed, the Ledaean beauty of which the
speaker dreams is a beauty born of violence. It is also a beauty, in the form of
Helen, that supposedly sparked a war.

Also in the second stanza of the poem, Yeats uses symbolism when he references "a
sinking fire." The fire here is symbolic of the speaker's life and passion, both of
which are fading because the speaker is now an old man. The fact that the speaker
says that the fire is "sinking" suggests that he has a keen sense of his own age.
This image of the old man's diminishing life is in stark contrast, or
juxtaposition, to the beauty of youth that the speaker sees in the school children.
The speaker's age is emphasized in juxtaposition to the youth of the children, and
the youth of the children, in turn, is emphasized by the age of the speaker.

In stanza 7 of the poem, the speaker says that images of youth are like holy relics
and that both can "break hearts." This is an example of a metaphor. Yeats doesn't
mean that images of youth can literally break hearts, but the metaphor emphasizes
the idea that the beauty of youth can be painful. The beauty of youth is painful
from the perspective of those who have lost it, and it is painful because it can
only ever be temporary.
What is the main idea of the poem "Among School Children"?
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DAVID MORRISON
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The main idea of this very complex poem is the ultimate unity of body and soul. In
Western philosophy, it has been common to separate the two. The ancient Greek
philosopher Plato provides the most famous example in this regard. He argued that
the soul was somehow more real than the body; it was eternal, whereas the body was
prone to aging, illness, and decay. Yeats disagrees with this, and takes Plato to
task for regarding nature as nothing more than the frothy foam on the ocean of
life:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Upon a ghostly paradigm of things

For Yeats, life is much more complex than Plato and other philosophers would have
us believe. Life is full of opposites, and yet a basic, primordial unity still
remains. The whole of reality is composed of many parts, but the whole is very much
greater than the sum of those parts. A chestnut tree, for example, doesn't simply
consist in leaf, blossom, or trunk, but a unity of all three. And that unity is the
spirit of the tree, the thing that gives the tree its life.

As with much of Yeats's poetry, "Among School Children" deals with the issue of
aging. But unlike Plato and many others before him, Yeats makes no effort to
separate the body from the soul. It doesn't matter whether we're eminent Greek
philosophers, little babies bouncing on our mothers' knees, or famous Irish poets,
old age comes to us all eventually, and it is pointless mourning the inevitable
loss of youth and beauty. The soul should not be tortured over the state of the
body, and vice versa. They exist together in a state of harmony, just as the bodily
movements of the dancer are at one with the dancer herself:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?