Among School Children
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From reading the poem, one could say that the things in Yeats mind at the time of visiting this catholic school were his old age, or him wanting to avoid old age, his mortality and the education process and techniques he is reviewing in the school.
To write this poem Yeats was thinking about children not reaching their full potential, and not fulfilling their dreams and also about the relevancy of schoolwork in preparation for life after school brings. Thus he is hoping that the Montessori Method of teaching will prevail in getting children to reach their full potential.
In the first line of the first stanza; “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning”, Yeats is questioning whether the lessons being taught are relevant to life, and that lifes true lessons do not come from the classroom. In the sixth line Yeats acknowledges that he is getting older, i.e. “a sixty-year-old smiling public man”.
In the second stanza Yeats makes a comparison between Leda (the mother of Helen of Troy) and the children, by the children inevitably being stripped of their purity by one trivial event, and Leda who was once pure, but was stripped of her purity after being raped by Zeus. Her child was Helen of Troy and Yeats sees his love, Maured and Helen as “the yolk and white of the one shell”, meaning that they are both equally matched and one in the same in all their beauty.
In the third and fourth stanzas, Yeats is again infatuated by the thoughts of Maured, as he looks for her as a child, and complements her beauty and grace. Yeats subtly again mentions his age as in the sixth line of the fourth stanza, “had pretty plumage once”. The fifth stanza is more about life in itself, i.e. the trauma of birth, the cycle of life and also Yeats is questioning as to whether it was worthwhile for his mother to give birth to him; a sixty-year-old frail man.
Age, more so Yeats age is something that is floating in his mind, so in search of answers Yeats decides to look to the greatest minds of the ancient era. He then realises that even though these men were world renound, they to eventually grew old and died, but their ideas and works lived on forever. Yeats thinks about Pythagoras, who to him was a failure; as he specialized in reducing reality to formula and considered them irrelevant in the 20th century; this obviously showing his disapproval of methods of teaching outside that of the Montessori style.
In the seventh stanza Yeats talks about mothers and nuns seeking perfection through devotion to religion or children and Yeats dismisses this as man mocking