Among School Children (1926)

Among School Children (1926) ‘The Tower’ (1928)

Yeats’ note on the composition “Topic for a poem – school children and the thought that life will waste them perhaps that no possible life can fulfil our dreams or even their teacher’s hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares us for what never happens.”

What was Yeats doing in the classroom? • By this point, Yeats is a senator for the Irish Free State: ‘ a sixty year old smiling public man’ • He visited schools in this role, and was particularly interested in the role of education • ‘Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.’ (Yeats) • At the time, the Montessori method was popular and was in the school he visited:

Montessori method • Mixed age classrooms, with classrooms for children ages 2½ or 3 to 6 years old by far the most common • Student choice of activity from within a prescribed range of options • Uninterrupted blocks of work time, ideally three hours • A constructivist or "discovery" model, where students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction • Specialized educational materials developed by Montessori and her collaborators • Freedom of movement within the classroom • A trained Montessori teacher

Note on form • Also in ottavarima – reflective/ sense of journey and progression of ideas • Typically used in heroic verse; suggests an ‘epic’ task • ABABABCC • Sestet and couplet • Twisting and turning journey of thought and fluctuations in mood; for example, frequent punctuation mark is the dash

Verse 1 Yeats visits a ‘long schoolroom’ in his role as senator. He presents himself objectively, with some irony, as if seen through the eyes of the children: ‘a smiling public man’. ‘in the best modern way’ – reference to latest trend in education of montessori

Verse 1 • What might Yeats’ ‘walk through long schoolroom questioning’ also symbolise? • What do you notice about the verb patterns to describe what the children are doing? • There is a level of irony in this stanza; find two examples and explain them. • How does Yeats use enjambment in the last three lines to explore the children’s response? Is he being serious? • ‘A sixty year old smiling public man’ has become a well known phrase. Think about what this ‘mask’ might signify and how it compares to the other selves you have seen elsewhere.

Verse 2 Here Yeats goes behind the mask, revealing the dreams behind the ‘smiling public man’ and memories of the ‘Ledeaen body’ of Maud Gonneand his younger, more romantic years. He remembers he telling a tale which united them both in mutual sympathy Ledaean body – Reference to Leda, but this clearly Maud Gonne Plato’s parable/ yolk and white of the one shell In Plato’s Symposium, he tells the story of how Zeus divided man from his original double, nearly spherical shape, into two halves; love is an attempt by humans to regain lost unity

Verse 2 • How does the persona presented in this verse differ from the persona in stanza 2? Find examples to support your point of view. • Yeats dreams of a ‘Ledaean body’ – what doe you make of this parallel between Maud and Leda? • Look at the use of alliteration and repetition in this stanza. What words/phrases stand out and why might Yeats have connected them? • ‘it seemed that our two natures blent’ – why ‘seemed’? • Yeats talks of the ‘dream’ here. Is this stanza more about desire than memories of what has actually happened in the past?

Verse 3 Yeats looks at the children and wonders about Maud as a child; was she like them?

Verse 3 • Yeats describes a ‘fit of grief or rage’; what is he grieving for and what is he angry about? • How does Yeats use punctuation and line division to reflect his thought process? • Yeats describes is heart as ‘driven wild’… how does this compare to other times he has mentioned his heart elsewhere? • The final couplet presents us with an image of Maud as ‘a living child’ in the present tense. What is the significance of this?

Verse 4 Becomes more of a memory/ stream-of-consciousness at this stage. Yeats reflects upon the passage of time and aging on both him and Maud. Quattrocento - The cultural and artistic events of 15th century Italy are collectively referred to as the Quattrocento encompasses the artistic styles of the late Middle Ages (most notably International Gothic) and the early Renaissance (e.g. Da Vinci)

Verse 4 • This verse is more of a stream-of-consciousness; what evidence can you find in the language and structure to support this? • Explore the image of Maud’s aging face: ‘Did Quattrocento finger fashion it/ Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind/And took a mess of shadows for its meat?’ How does it compare to other images of aging seen here (e.g. old scarecrow) and other poems in the collection? Why does Yeats interject here with ‘enough of that’? • This is arguably the third image of Maud in this poem; what is the effect of this triptych? • Is there an element of ‘self-quarrelling’ evident in this stanza?

Verse 5 Yeats’ focus now shifts to mothers and children – what would a youthful mother think of her son at sixty? Would she feel the pain of childbirth had been worthwhile? ‘Honey of the generation’ –allusion to Porphyry’s ‘On the Cave of Nymphs’ and refers to the pleasures of generation/ procreation

Verse 5 • This stanza is formed of a question; was the suffering of birth worth it? Do you think Yeats means this question to be rhetorical? What might the answer be? • Note the sibilance in this verse. What is the effect of it? • There are lexical patterns here associated with suffering; find them and explore their impact. • ‘Honey of generation’ seems to stand in contrast to the rest of the verse. Why might this be?

Verse 6 Yeats now reflects upon other philosophers, teachers, educators (Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras) and suggests that in spite of their achievements, they too were subject to the physical realities of aging and death; they are simply ‘old clothes on old sticks’. 1) ‘Plato’ the idealist, dismissive of nature 2) ‘Soldier Aristotle’, more of a materialist, but remembered here as the tutor of Alexander the Great, whom he punished with ‘the taws’ (a Scottish word for a schoolmaster’s leather strap) 3) ‘Pythagoras’ the mathematician and astronomer who believed in the music of spheres – music unable to rouse the interest of the ‘careless muses’

Verse 6 • Why did Yeats choose these particular three men? • What does the language used for each man suggest about their theories of knowledge/ approach to understanding? • To what extent is Yeats questioning the value of knowledge here?

Verse 7 Yeats returns to mothers and nuns, suggesting both worship ‘images’ – mothers worship their children and nuns worship candlelit statues (nuns are apparently more permanent). However, both are destined to have their hearts broken as all these images of apparent perfection only serve to mock man’s condition. The Presences – are both the statues and the children, representing passion, piety or affection

Verse 7 • Explore the ‘images’ in this section • Find examples that suggest insincerity (think about sounds too) • How does Yeats create a tone of mockery/ disgust in this stanza? • What does this line mean: ‘O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise’?

Verse 8 Finally Yeats turns to ‘labour’ which could refer to the suffering of humanity since the fall of Adam and Eve, or just more generally to work or art. Here Yeats resolves the conflicts of the human condition (and the poem?) suggesting that labour/life will only blossom/dance when: • The body isn’t sacrificed to the soul • Beauty isn’t born out of despair • Wisdom is not achieved by hard toil The final two rhetorical questions suggest that in a chestnut tree, all parts are needed to work in unity, and that in a dance, the dancer and dance are unified for that moment in time. It seems to affirm that is impossible to reduce images to their parts. Bole - the section of the trunk of a tree beneath the point where branching commences

Verse 8 • Line by line, what does each suggest about the nature of life and work/art; analyse through the images themselves. • There is arguably more negative affirmation here: ‘Nor…Nor’. If so what, is Yeats negatively affirming? • Why all the ‘O’s? Where have you seen these before? • Why choose an image of a ‘chestnut tree’? What might it symbolise? • The final couplet is almost dance like in its rhythm. What does the dance and the dancer symbolise though?

Critics • The poem ends with a satisfying and convincing assertion of value – ‘no static image will now serve, there must be movement, the different sort of life that a dancer has by comparison with the most perfect object of art’. (Frank Kermode) • F.R Leavis sees the climax of the poem as coming with ‘a perfect cogency of musical logic’. • Helen Vendler describes the end of the poem as follows: ‘the fully human portrait of a dancer inventing a dance to the music of time reconceives life as a fluid motion, a voluntary co-operation with, and interpretation of, one’s fated location in historical time and space.’

Among School Children (1926)