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William Butler YeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The first stanza of “Among School Children” opens with an accessible, conversational tone that’s unusual for Yeats’s work, and an effective contrast to the more multi-layered stanzas as the poem progresses. The poet, an aging politician, walks through a girls’ school asking questions of the nuns who work there. He oversees the children’s work as they learn in “the best modern way” (Line 6); this is a reference to the Montessori method which had been recently implemented in this school and others like it. The stanza closes with the images of a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” (Line 8), showing the contrast between the poet’s age and the children’s youth. Despite the age difference, however, the scene is a positive one; the nun is kind and the poet smiles, giving us a warm and lighthearted atmosphere as the poem begins.
In the second stanza the politician’s mind begins to wander as he remembers the woman he loves—not as she is now, but when they were young and she had a body as beautiful as Leda’s from the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, a story which Yeats also visited in more of his work.
By William Butler Yeats
A Prayer for My Daughter
A Prayer for My Daughter
William Butler Yeats
A Vision
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka
William Butler Yeats
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
William Butler Yeats
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
William Butler Yeats
Death
Death
William Butler Yeats
Easter, 1916
Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats
Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats
No Second Troy
No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
The Wild Swans at Coole
William Butler Yeats
When You Are Old
When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats