Authoritative image: "Among school children" and Italian education reform, The

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1997 by Harper, Margaret Mills

Yeats's poem "Among School Children" does not linger in the "long schoolroom" that provides its occasion. It moves off with seeming randomness into one topic after another, much as the "momentary wonder" of busy children interrupted in the midst of their daily activities by an official visitor might be replaced by other absorptions.' Indeed, if the schoolroom were run on Montessori principles, as was St. Otteran's, the school that Senator Yeats visited in February 1926, the children also would move from activity to activity as they chose. The rhythm of a Montessori classroom as each child takes down and manipulates geometric blocks, mathematical rods, or cardboard letters parallels the structural rhythm of "Among School Children" while the poet first dreams of a beloved and imagines her as a child, meditates on aging and the passage of time, veers to speculate on Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, muses on the worship of images, and finally invokes those images to create a rhapsodic conclusion that seemingly confounds the poem's apparently restless motion. Yet the schoolroom has not disappeared. The structural rhythm suggests discovery, that wisdom may be drawn forth (educere) from the raw materials of memory and desire, as well as the building up (in-struo) of image and idea to create a meaningful whole. The subject matter treats educational issues like the apparent contradictions of freedom and discipline. Individual images also suggest the school: the children's staring eyes in the first stanza and the neat, "best modern way" of educating them adumbrate the "brightening glance," unbruised body, and undespairing wisdom of the last lines.

Yeats's late interest in education permeates the poem. As Elizabeth Cullingford has noticed, although "it is often assumed that by the last stanza of the poem Yeats has 'transcended' the local and particular historical incident out of which it arose," the last stanza is in fact very close to Yeats's concrete experiences that form its historical context, his work as a Senator involved in the debate over the School Attendance Bill and as a school inspector. Cullingford asserts that the "evocation of unalienated labor and joyful learning" in the last four lines of the poem "can be read both as an impossible Utopia and as a plea for a humane and decent system of primary education" (199). More generally, the concerns that drive "Among School Children," its patterns of imagery, its rhetoric and syntax, and even the sway of the speaking subject, who can be found in "smiling public man," youthful lover with "blent" nature and "pretty plumage," "old scarecrow," infant "shape" on a mother's lap, and invoker of "self-born" mocking Presences, all speak of the poet, senator, and father who was developing and airing convictions about schooling during the 1920s.

These convictions were unstable at the core, and this essay will suggest that their fundamental instability as well as the depth of Yeats's emotional attachment to them contribute powerfully to the distinctiveness of the poem. In order to understand Yeats's attitudes, I will examine the conflicted politics of two of his main intellectual sources: the theories and practices of Maria Montessori and Giovanni Gentile. Their influence on Yeats was documented by Donald Torchiana over thirty years ago, but to unpack the political conflicts between them and to infer the emotional charges ofthe material that Torchiana identified is to read the poem in considerably different terms than he did, or others have.2 For one thing, Yeats's passionate engagement with ideas and images is also a very material concern with the relation of human beings to the state and with the disjunctions between the development of individual children, including his own, and the creation and continuation of culture. With Italian theory in mind, the wrestling in the poem with the problems created by the power of time, ideas, and images over human life looks less as if it is won by the end. The ending of the poem has often been read as a triumphant resolution, in the first four lines, of Adam's curse-the necessity for labor to make beauty-in spirituality, art, physical grace, or wisdom. The last quatrain then seems to overcome the contradictions of whole and part in the image of the living chestnut tree, motion and stillness in the image of the dancer. But the triumph also questions itself. The resolution announces its own flaws, in syntax that is notoriously difficult, in logic that chooses contiguous association rather than linear progression, and in a voice that depicts internal struggle as well as certain conviction. I see the presentation of these conflicts as the central statement of the poem, and in it I see the lofty ideals and the practical work as well as the underlying horrors of Fascist Italy.

Children do not figure much in Yeats's poetry. There are of course two prayertitled poems for his children, one from The Tower, at whose near center "Among School Children" appears, and a better one in the previous volume, but neither "A Prayer for My Daughter" nor "A Prayer for My Son" has much to do with the children to whom they are dedicated. There are few other poems about childhood, certainly in the late verse. Yet it is interesting to remember that Yeats had two young children during the years in which he wrote some of his most powerful verse, although he was from all accounts a rather distant father, preoccupied among other distractions with the ill health that increasingly occupied his old age. "Among School Children" is the poem of a sixty-year-old father of children who were seven and four years old when it was written in June 1926. In this regard, Stanza 5, with its evocation of a "youthful mother" and her child as a "shape / With sixty or more winters on its head" gathers emotional impact from the facts that a "youthful mother" had given birth to Yeats's own children and father no less than child was undergoing a certain "uncertainty of his setting forth" into the labor of parenting.