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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...