Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Among School Children" is a poem written by William Butler Yeats in 1926. It is a complex meditation on the themes of aging, mortality, and the cycle of life, as well as a reflection on the role of education in shaping human lives. The poem is structured around a series of contrasts and paradoxes: youth and age, innocence and experience, beauty and decay, and the finite and the infinite.

The poem is set in a schoolroom, where the speaker, who is an older man, is questioning a nun about the children's education. The children are learning "to cipher and to sing, to study reading-books and history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the best modern way." As the speaker watches the children, he is reminded of his own youth and of the mythological figure of Leda, whose story is a meditation on the cycle of life and death.

The poem then moves to a reflection on the relationship between mother and child, and the pain and joy of birth and raising a child. The speaker then considers the ideas of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Pythagoras, who sought to understand the mysteries of life and death through their study of the natural world.

Finally, the poem ends with a meditation on the nature of beauty, which the speaker sees as something that blossoms and dances in the world, rather than something that is born out of pain and despair. The poem ends with a question that encapsulates its central paradox: how can we know the dancer from the dance? In other words, how can we understand the nature of beauty and its relationship to the cycle of life and death?

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