W.B.Yeats: Among School Children

This beautiful poem by Yeats is really one of his very best. And his best is made of gold and bronze. I dedicate this reading of the poem to The Lady Anne, Maras Veil, whose own beautiful poem 'Dance of the Sacred Flame' made me think of Yeats.

Among School Children
I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

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• children
• charles
• bryant
• spoken
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• anne
• maras
• veil

[PoetLina]

Attempting to catch up with my viewings I came across this. It is quite wonderful! Those last lines are somehow engraved in my memory and without thinking, I often quote those last lines, they are the way I view it all. Thank you, Charles.

[brychar66]

@PoetLina Yes Halina Yeats is wonderfully memorable and seems to give expression to the whole of life, not just bits. Thank you for listening, and I hope you are well my lovely :) Crumbs I see you have posted some great Larkin, I must go listen!

[neil660]

"Plato thought nature but a spume that plays, upon a ghostly paradigm of things." This is my favourite line of poetry. To encapsulate so articulately, so boldly on Platonic thought is remarkable. I try to read this poem, but I am 26. How can I read this poem with any conviction? Impossible. A sixty-year-old public man is obviously not me! Thank you for the reading. You have a beautiful voice.

[brychar66]

@neil660 Thank you, I appreciate your kind comments.

[trisoctehedron]

GOOD GRIEF! I feel like I did upon first discovering T. S. Eliot as a kid. I don't quite know what he's talking about, but he's doing it in a way that sure sounds good!

Nice voice you have, as always, for really intense varieties of poetry. I wonder if it would work with Wordsworth? I also would love to hear you do a bit of Gerard Manly Hopkins.

[brychar66]

Hi there & thanks - yes I've done quite a bit of Hopkins - see my back numbers! I've done some Wordsworth on my Poetry Visualised pages. Regards, Chas

[frippp66]

I love this poem - thank you for posting. 

[colicolefrench]

Thank you. Lovely.

[Zimologist]

Wonderful.

[hartistry]

Great Reading. I love this poem!

[bafr1]

like all men or at least most , we get better looking as we get older

well done charles

[mmmpoetry]

:) excellent