Yeats: 'Among School Children'

Author(s): CHRIS HANSON

Source: Critical Survey , SUMMER 1973, Vol. 6, No. 1/2 (SUMMER 1973), pp. 90-94
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41553918

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 CHRIS HANSON

Yeats:
'Among School Children'
I V
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning: What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
A kind old nun in a white hood replies; Honey of generation had betrayed,
The children learn to cipher and to sing, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
To study reading books and histories, As recollection or the drug decide,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything Would think her son, did she but see that shape
In the best modern way - the children's eyes With sixty or more winters on its head,
In momentary wonder stare upon A compensation for the pang of his birth,
A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

II VI

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event Solider Aristotle played the taws
That changed some childish day to tragedy - Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
Or eke, to alter Plato's parable, What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Into the yolk and white of the one shell. Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

III VII

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage Both nuns and mothers worship images,
I look upon one child or t'other there But those the candles light are not as those
And wonder if she stood so at that age - That animate a mother's reveries,
For even daughters of the swan can share But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
Something of every paddler's heritage - And yet they too break hearts - О Presences
And had that colour upon cheek or hair, That passion, piety or affection knows,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild: And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
She stands before me as a living child. О self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

IV VIII

Her present image floats into the mind - Labour is blossoming or dancing where
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
And took a mess of shadows for its meat ? Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
And I though never of Ledaean kind О chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole ?
Better to smile on all that smile, and show О body swayed to music, О brightening glance,
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. How can we know the dancer from the dance ?

and surprisingly non-personal. Everybody

Yeats vein,vein,
is hehea seems
strangeat seems
times toat use
figure. times In to a use quite his Byronic poetry
his poetry knows about Maud Gonne and Yeats's
to parade the pageant of his bleeding heart in unrequited love (high and orthodox Romanti-
a thoroughly histrionic manner, and yet when cism, this), about his resentment against the
we come to look at what he gives us of his approach of old age, about his esoteric and to
essential privacy, we find it is pretty general sceptical or irreverent minds half-baked magi-

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 Teats : ť Among School Children 9 9 1
In stanza
cal mysticism, about his part in the Irish II we move with the T of the
nationalistic movement; and all these, to be from this comfortable enough 'public-
poem
sure, are there in his poetry. But they are notinto a world of private recollection, from
ness'
the world of 'I walk' to the world of 'I dream'.
there in a simple and direct confessional sense;
they are as it were acted-out in the poetry,Going
and from the actual children of the present
in being acted-out, they become something to the remembered child of the past, we are
other than Yeats. He talks of intensely private involved not quite in simple flashback, but in a
emotions in an intensely public way ; rhetoric, recollection in the past of an even remoter
oratory, the larger-than-life platform gesture past; the 'Ledaean body' is remembering an
become part of the essence of his poetry. He incident
is from a period in her life unknown to
a man who is always talking about himself, the poet both then and now, so that in the next
but it is to an audience rather than to a close stanza, he must 'wonder' what she was like at
familiar friend, and there is always thethat time. This movement back and forth in
distance that separates the stalls from the
time, not obviously or heavily stressed, estab-
stage. lishes a suggestion of temporal flux, a move-
'Among School Children' demonstrates this ment that is not a journeying from one fixed
superbly; all the elements I have suggested point to another, but a mutual interchange, a
above, all the attitudes I have implied, are here kind of moving pattern, as of dancing, that
expressed with a completeness and purity that they are making together. The visualized or
he doesn't quite achieve elsewhere. I think it 'dreamt' Ledaean body refers the reader not
is because here both self-consciousness and only to the myth of Leda, mother of Helen of
emotion are at their height; attitudes areby Zeus, who possessed her in the shape
Troy
struck, but they are keenly felt, most of un-a swan, but also to Yeats's 'Leda and the
Anglo-Saxon, attitudes, and the actor's talent, Swan', a superbly realized poem whose images
the skill that at once conceals and draws suggest ideas of beauty, of power, of the inter-
mingling
attention to itself, is in full and exuberant flow. of human and divine, of fate and of
The first stanza sets precisely thethe linking of past, present and future. The
public
wholeoncomplex of reactions to 'Leda and the
element of the experience the poem is going
to create, simply and straightforwardly Swan'
enough.enters into this poem to remain as
There is a situation envisaged (one perhaps
must only latent suggestions of beauty,
remember that Yeats as much as Browning mystery is and passion, and to initiate the
the poet of the dramatic monologue) in questioning,
which questing, shape that the poem
an ageing man, a distinguished visitortakes (V.I.P.)
on from this point. Like so many poems,
is being shown round a school, asking 'Among theSchool Children' is an exploration of
right intelligent questions and getting the experience
right rather than a statement about it.
intelligent answers. What is established here Withisthe intensification of personal feeling
first the public nature of the occasion, which
there is another shift, that from the near-ironic
becomes the frame for the private revelations detachment of the 'public man' and the ever-
of the rest of the poems, and then the so-mildly
juxta- interested school children to the
position of youth and age: youth onlyemotional mildly involvement of one with another
and fleetingly curious about this remoteimplied figure by 'sphere' and 'the yolk and white of
in tow of the senior mistress, and agethe one shell' ; 'Plato's parable' is his myth of
equally
mildly, perhaps slightly sceptically, amused the human
by sphere (a symbol of perfection)
the performance that he, 'the kind old thatnun'
embodied both man and woman before it
and to some extent the children are putting was torn
on. apart to provide the two sexes - now
Rhythms and phrasings are themselves 'neat
always struggling to re-unite themselves.
in everything', parcelled out, until the The third stanza makes more explicit the
enlarged movement of the last two-and-a-halfquality of personal feeling and involvement
lines of the stanza prepares us for the important and the co-presence of past and present. Was
shift of direction, stress and feeling that this remembered, very special, very private,
immediately follows. 'she' of the past ever like one of these ordinary

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 92 Chris Hanson
indifferent children in this
though connected common-pla
images and impressions of
classroom of the here and
the first half now,
into this area he asks; wa
of wider speculation,
though connection and inheritrix
she, to his mind half-divine, personal involvement of the
god-swan's beauty andare maintained
power, by 'sixty or more
ever winters onlike one
these domestic ducklings?
its head'. This stanzaWith
asks the centralthis
question though
the past takes over, of
andthe poem,
in whichaI think can be simply and phrase,
histrionic
accurately enough
a large emotional gesture, the formulated:
poet is what Man
stresses the
goes through worth it, when emotion,
sudden onrush of unexpected one looks at the crud
but direct after the effects of time ? It starts with of
subtleties a close association
feeling th
of woman thereupon
have gone before : 'And, and youthfulness, 'What myyouthful heart i
driven wild9. I don'tmother',
think and moves that immediately to the baby,
it particularly
which is at once
matters, or helps much, to enveloped
know by the that
vaguely this
ominous: 'that
figure is possibly Maud shape upon herit
Gonne: lap' with its
is enough
paradoxical
that there is a vigorous suggestion of formlessness
expression of romantic (we
don't know
intensity, of passionate what shape that shape has).
youthfulness andThe high
even spectacular, two'showy', feeling;
ages, mother and baby, straddle as it werewhat
the the
effectively created is age of the children of the first
contrast stanza as
between the
urbane remoteness part ofofthe the continuing
opening movement back and
stanzas an
this reborn emotional turmoil. forth in time. The 'shape' has been tricked or
Stanza IV starts with another time-shift:
cheated into life by the 'honey of generation,
her 'present image' replaces her past image
the sweetness of fulfilled biological urges in the
(note how firmly the movements of feelingparents,
are betrayed from its Platonic pre-natal
happiness (Before born babe bliss had, as
revealed in terms of the visual, of something
actually seen). A different kind of beauty,
Yeats's compatriot James Joyce puts it), and
trails not Wordsworthian clouds of glory but
fine-drawn and ethereal, appears, suggesting
Renaissance ideals of human perfection. fury
The and resentment as it remembers what it
last four lines lead us out of these intensities of has lost and struggles to escape from the
emotion into something more nearly related tocalamity of having been born, occasionally
the amused detachment of the first stanza: solaced by the kindly anaesthetic of forgetful-
'never of Ledaean kind' and 'pretty plumage ness. From this angry struggle we move into
once' is a rueful and self-aware glance back the at
bleakness of old age; it is winter's blight
rather than summer's crown that presents
the younger Yeats of the meticulously careless
lock of hair and the Byronic gaze. From itself
here, to the mother's gaze; a gaze directed
the poem moves into the bitterer mood after of 'aall by the sixty year old man, now neither
comfortable kind of old scare-crow' which at public nor smiling.
once refers to 'the tatters of its mortal dress' of The five stanzas up to this point have
'Sailing to Byzantium' and anticipates its ownprogressed along a fairly easily perceptible
'Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird': path of association : we can see how an idea
resentment, anger and self-contempt come into rises from the one before; but VI seems to
the poem. start on a new track. The new direction is

Here, half-way through the poem, there is a emphasized by a sudden change of movement
major change of direction. The first half of the
poem is concerned with an immediate personal
experience and a response to it, with what the
'I' of the poem saw and felt. The second half
expands into more general considerations set
under way by that personal experience, rising
from it and shaped by it. The one sentence
that constitutes stanza V, in its leisureliness
moves us away from the rapidly changing
and tempo ; in place of the gradually unfolding
sentence of V we have a briskly definite series
of statements: 'Plato thought..' 'Solider
Aristotle played the taws . .' In fact, there is a
clearly logical connection: these are answers
that have been given in the past to the
questions adumbrated in Stanza V, general
answers, not particular or personal. Yeats
points us in the direction of various philo-
sophical explanations of the nature of the

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 Teats : c Among School Children 9 93
world and man's place in it. This stanza Stanza
is a VII combines some of the sugges-
tions of the two immediately preceding stanzas
good example of the precision of vision, actual
seeing, and image that underlies Yeats's large
and blends in with them something of the first
rhetorical gestures. The 'ghostly paradigm5
half ofis the poem ; there is a constant movement
Plato's 'idea' : 'ghostly' because it is an to and fro in the poem, rather like the move-
unbodied reality; a 'paradigm' because it isment of internal references in Keats's 'Ode to
the essential bare bones of reality. 'Nature',a Nightingale'. The 'kind old mm' reappears
the world of appearances, settles on this realwith the 'youthful mother' : they are no longer
but to the senses imperceptible essence and singular and particular, but plural and general.
makes it visible, just as salt sea spray wouldThe stanza is a series of reflections that has
settle on the invisible surface of a perfectly castgrown from the experiences of the poem up to
and perfectly polished glass object and make it this point, rising naturally from them and
apparent to sight ; what we would actually see moving towards the closing statement-question
with our natural eyes is sea-spray, but it gives of the last stanza. The images that both nuns
shape to the reality that lies underneath itsand mothers worship are indeed different, but
coating glaze, and is what we, in common use,both are creations of a mind responding to that
take to be the real. Aristotle is 'solider' because on which it fixes its attention: there is an
objectively real faith, an objectively real child;
he reasons from what actually can be seen, and
makes his deductions from there, rather than the perfected ideal of the contemplated object
by working the other way round, downwards has its own absolute reality for the observer.
That of religion has a tranquillity, an implied
from what ought to be to what is ; solider, too,
because he was a practising teacher who was permanence, a solidity ('a marble or a bronze
tutor to Alexander the Great, a man who had repose')
a that is denied to the amorphous 'shape'
of flesh and blood and human passion (a
very direct and immediate effect on history,
and taught him, moreover, by the highly country that Yeats tells us elsewhere is not for
old men) ; but nevertheless it can produce
untheoretical method of that Gaelic academic
purely human suffering: it is 'hearts', not
aide-memoire the taws, a heavy leather strap.
Diametrically opposed to this practicality ideals,
is that are shattered. Yet these Images
take on an autonomous power; they become
the mystic mathematics of Pythagoras, world-
famous with a kind of film-star fan-club Presences of numinous potency : the passion of
popularity and complete with his own 'honey
myth. of generation', the affection of the
'youthful mother', the piety of the nun - all
All three (and by implication all philosophical
different,
systems) are dismissed as empty illusions, as but not necessarily separate. They
become
unreal and impotent as a scarecrow, a kind of not signs but embodiments (the actual
whistling in the dark to cheer ourselvesthings
up. themselves) of 'all heavenly glory',
There is too a link with Yeats's usual vision of things that are clearly outside and above
'decrepit age' as a ludicrous scarecrow, humanity, but springing from it and to that
extent part of it. They are unique and like the
bringing back into the poem the 'sixty-year-old
smiling public man'. This link is emotive phoenix self-born, brought into being by the
'enterprise' of man, by his highest aspirations
rather than logical, but what age has to offer
is associated in the image with what philo- to and intuitions of goodness and greatness ; by
sophical wisdom has to offer: at best, irrele-
their very nature they tease and torment him :
vance, and at worst, panic and emptiness. Atman is tortured by his own ideals. It is
precisely because man is capable of these
this point I should like to emphasize the
aspiring ideals that he is tortured by them,
incompleteness of this sort of exegesis; this
Yeats is saying; if he weren't capable of
crossword puzzle kind of explanation only
setting up ideals, he would be incapable of
points towards part of the complex emotional,
intellectual and sensuous statement of the
anguish when he fails to reach them; he could
stanza and the poem as a whole : to behappily
aware feed a little life with dried tubers.
of the references is the beginning of Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly up-
being
aware of the totality of the poem. wards; the poem has brought us to this point

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 94 Chris Hanson
of awareness, that achievement,
queried fulfilm
is the possibility of our understanding
spiritual awareness,
it. So thejoy, selflessness,
last group of images turns to spon-
cation are, or seem taneous,
to unreflecting, unconscious, creative
be, ineluctably tie
with struggle, pain, nature, the majestic and
effort, flourishing chestnut
continually
longed labour-pains. tree that simultaneously is its own past,
This realization is followed in the last present and future, and which at any time is
stanza by the splendid assertion ofvitally
what itself, what it has been, is now, and will
should be - indeed, of what is: 'labour is become. The last two lines, specifically
blossoming'. Blossoming is a necessary stage in evoking human life and energy, express it as
the process of fruition, the most beautiful activity, ordered activity, and ask how can we
isolate such activity (labour) from the beauty
stage; it is part of a natural process that is in
itself delightful. Dancing is an expression of it produces (the ordered beauty of the dance),
happiness and vitality (again, see 'Ode to sincea labour is itself part of the beauty; how
Nightingale'), a spontaneous but conscious
can the produced blossom be separate from the
activity. But labour, that activity and pro- forces that produce it; how can the dance, the
ductive energy that generally involves grief, pattern of childhood, maturity and age, of the
struggle and wearing-out, reaches its perfec- labour and the enterprise, of the public and the
tion when it frees itself from them by its ownprivate, of the scarecrows and the Presences,
creativity and spontaneity, when beauty is the exist until it is enacted: the dancer is the
beauty of natural fulfilment and possession,dance, the labour is the blossoming. And here
and when wisdom is accompanied not by theit is essential to listen to everything that is
exhaustion and drab weariness of ťblear-eyeďgoing on in this last stanza : its movement and
cadence make it a question, rather than a
but by happy exhilaration. At this point what
started as an assertion shades off into a direct assertion: the goodness, the positive
values are resoundingly stated, but so, more
question, but the actuality of such unqualified
and triumphant activity is not denied; obliquely,
what is is the How ? and the Why ?

Further Reading: For the text of Yeats, Collected Poems and Collected Plays , London, 1950 and 1952 are standa
most easily accessible life is that by Joseph Hone, W. B, Teats , London, 1942, now in Pelican Biographies.
a vast critical literature, but probably the best way in to a thorough study of Yeats is by means of Richard K
two books Teats, the Man and the Masks , London, 1949, and The Identity of Teats , London, 1954; both are
in paperback. Louis MacNeice's The Poetry of W. B. Teats , London, 1 941, is interesting as the reaction of one
another. There is a useful Reader's Guide to W. В . Teats, by John Unterecker, London, 1959. Many of the best
essays are collected in Penguin Critical Anthologies' W . В . Teats > ed. W. H. Pritchard. I would particula
your attention to Yvor Winters' essay in this collection: it contains an uninhibited piece of hatchet-work o
School Children' that would leave the most imperceptive of readers thoroughly aware that he doesn't like

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