The Tower (Yeats)/Among School Children

by W. B. Yeats

AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN

II 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 history,To cut and sew, be neat in everythingIn the best modern way—the children's eyesIn momentary wonder stare uponA sixty year old smiling public man.

III dream of a Ledæan body, bentAbove a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial eventThat changed some childish day to tragedy—Told, and it seemed that our two natures blentInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,Or else, to alter Plato's parable,Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

IIIAnd thinking of that fit of grief or rageI look upon one child or t'other thereAnd wonder if she stood so at that age—For even daughters of the swan can shareSomething 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.

IVHer present image floats in to the mind—Did quattrocento finger fashion itHollow of cheek as though it drank the windAnd took a mass of shadows for its meat?And I though never of Ledæan kindHad pretty plumage once—enough of that,Better to smile on all that smile, and showThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

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

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

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

VIIILabour is blossoming or dancing whereThe 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?