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

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

It is not surprising that disturbances analyzed in terms of "poetics" in the 1960s should more recently be examined in terms of political resonances." Michael North has pointed to "politics as a disruptive force in the formal organization of [the] works" of modernist writers generally: "The relationship of the individual to the community," North argues, "of literature to practical action, of the individual parts of a work of art to its overall structure-these are problems the poets tried to solve simultaneously . . . , so that practical conflicts and theoretical difficulties emerge as formal problems in the poetry" (vii).

The practical conflicts and theoretical difficulties that surface in "Among School Children" may be viewed as a dialectic between two constructions that may be defined as sources of authority or anti-authority for human choices in the face of time, society, and solitude. On one side of the equation we find the figures of an elder statesman; a "kind old nun"; a schoolmaster or other figure administering "a harsh reproof" or perhaps causing some "trivial event / That changed some childish day to tragedy"; a mother; three Greek philosophers; and the "images" worshipped by nuns and mothers. On the other side are the children at the school whose "eyes / In momentary wonder stare upon" the "sixty-year-old smiling public man"; the "Ledaean body" of Helen of Troy and, behind her, a young Maud Gonne; the "living child" that is this memory/myth's present representative in the poem; and perhaps the undefined "shape" upon the lap of the youthful mother in stanza 5.

The poem can be read in ways that emphasize one or the other sides of this dialectic. One kind of approach emphasizes the Neoplatonic elements, praising the present image of the beloved in stanza 4 in the sense that it is an image that might be used by "Quattrocento finger" so unearthly is its arresting beauty even in age, extolling the philosophers in stanza 6 despite the mocking tone in which they are described, or finding the images of dancer and tree to be embodiments of truth that cannot be matched by the poor mortal philosophers or the poor "modern" students in the first stanza. In such readings the poem mourns the passage of time and loss of eternity endured by the "shape . . . Honey of generation had betrayed" in stanza 5 and endorses the worship of images in stanza 7, although those images are unsympathetic to mortal concerns, "mockers of man's enterprise." In such an analysis, the final apostrophes might be seen as re-establishing a transcendent world of form of which the poet has despaired in the earlier stanzas. Such a reading has the weight of a lot of Yeats's opinions on its side of the scales. This is the Yeats of Byzantium, of Theosophy, of eulogizing the fallen world of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and of the Thirteenth Cone of A Vision. It is also the Yeats of the original "note" for "Among School Children," from a notebook begun at Oxford on April 7, 1921: "Topic for poem. School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams or even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens" (Bradford 4).