Examining Yeats's Colon: The Magical and Philosophical Progression of Ideas in "Among School Children" (William Butler Yeats) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Yeats's "Among School Children" is perhaps the most anthologized of his poems, undoubtedly because it is narrative in nature, captures a cross-section of both his exoteric and esoteric ideas, and contains a number of intertextual references to his other poems that are obvious even to casual readers (as opposed to Yeats scholars). I myself use it, along with "Leda and the Swan" and "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," in many of my literature surveys for these very reasons. Further, the standard interpretation best summarized in Sandra Gilbert's The Poetry of William Butler Yeats--"that beneath the seeming discontinuity of child and old man there is always a single whole" (73)--is fairly easy for even half-awake students in 8:00 AM humanities general education classes to seize upon. Nevertheless, despite the fact that most readers--even experienced critics like Gilbert--tend to focus on the fundamental statements and questions that Yeats poses in stanza 8, these are in no way central to the poem. They do not connect well with the progression of ideas, and the sudden, strident shift in tone is abrupt and jarring. The two ultimate questions, "Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?" and "How can we know the dancer from the dance?", are so obviously rhetorical that they negate any sense of closure whatsoever. In fact, they are almost philosophically clichEd, given the fact that the self-same questions are raised by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12-26, in Plato's Parmenides, and in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In short, Yeats' s final questions function as "feel good" statements that are more for the reader's comfort than the poet's. They are simply another attempt "to smile on all that smile, and show / There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow."