The structure of the poem Among School Children is a complex one in which through its eight stanzas the

speaker in the poem is led on to contemplate and express his views on various apparently unrelated questions. The speaker is a refined literary sixty year old man, who is most likely the author himself who in the first stanza is observing schoolchildren and who shares his feelings evoked in him through this experience in the consequent stanzas. The first stanza has already provided what can possibly be called the base of the structure or the scope of the poem to develop till the end. The poem increasingly becomes contemplative and the narrator assumes a melancholy and reflective tone. The narrative of the poem is lyrical, written in blank verse and is similar to the kind of stream of consciousness technique some of the modernist novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf used in some of their famous works. The poet has made use of several contrasting images and some of the metaphors keep recurring in the poem. In Among School Children there are eight stanzas of eight lines each with a rhyme scheme of abababcc. The movement of the thought is supported by recurring imagery--the scarecrow, Leda (and swans), history, Plato, "image" and "dream." While looking at the school children the speaker is self conscious and and imagines that he must be appearing to them as a sixty-year old smiling man. This image of the selfconsciousness of the narrator as an old man recurs again later in the poem in the fourth stanza when he jestingly refers to himself as a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. From observing the school children the poet is led on to thinking about the woman he loves. This is widely known as a reference to Maud Gonne who was the woman deeply admired by Yeats and whom he in this poem as well as some others also refers to as the muse. The poem contains some clear autobiographical elements as the reference to Maud Gonne indicates and it is also known that the opportunity of observing schoolchildren had chanced upon Yeats in an official capacity. The sight of the children reminds the speaker of a story told him by his loved one about some incident of harsh reproof..which turned some childish day to tragedy and the narrative of the poem shifts from the public space of the school in the first stanza to the personal in the second and the emphasis abruptly but also quite plausibly and naturally shifts, from the point of view of the children ( as indicated in the last line of the first stanza) to his own. This abrupt shift also serves to highlight the kind of intense love Yeats must have felt for Maud as the lines recalling how he had sympathised with her our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy. This sympathy thus aroused is also seen by the narrator as having achieved a kind of symbolic union with his beloved and compares it to Platos parable about the human element consisting of both the male and female. The speaker thus transported by his imagination in the third stanza continues to think about her beloved and goes on to imagine her as a child. This again shows the kind of

passion with which he loves her while also revealing that he does not know much about her childhood and this makes him curious and he sees her image in the school children in front of him. The tone is light but reflective and almost playful till the fourth stanza from where it begins to be increasingly melancholic and the subject and opinions expressed by the poet more general than personal. The image and the subject gradually but interconnectedly continues to shift throughout the poem as it happens when in the fourth stanza the poet is led on to think about his own youth from thinking about the beloved and from there to his present state. He again becomes self conscious about his old age as he had been in front of the youthful presence of the school children in the first stanza. He tries to joke about it but the concern with old age remains and continues till the next stanza where he talks about mortality. Here too, Yeats presents some contrasting images like youthful mother and the youth of a child to give birth to whom the mother has to suffer so much pain, is compared to that of its inevitable fate as an old man in the future. After this the poem grows more and more melancholy and the subject or theme becomes more general than personal. In a melancholic mood the narrator in the sixth stanza thinks about Platos view which the author seems to think is negative about nature being based on a ghostly paradigm of things. But this is conteracted in the very next line when he talks about Aristotles almost opposite view according to which Art too has a more worthy role and so the artist can be more comfortable with this view. Aristotle is also shown as a more positive and more active intellect as he is also said to have tutored Alexander the Great. The reference to Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras also serves to highlight another side of the poets personality and locates his persona as that of an intellectual and mature figure. The narrator time and again reveals his intellectual interests- the reference to Plato occurs twice and Quattrocento a fifteenth century artist is also named in the fourth stanza. The poem is structured in a way so that these opinions are not presented to the reader directly but subtly hinted at through the use of symbols and references. All these reflections culminate in the final stanza into the great themes of life and art, body and soul, and that of the specific and the whole. The poem is philosophical throughout and the poet almost concludes by contemplating about an ideal in which the body is not bruised to pleasure soul. The last stanza is a kind of conclusion to his reflections on various themes occurring in the poem. Yeats again emphasises upon the interconnectedness of things and the importance of the whole. He also talks about the relationship of the artist with his art in the last line, How can we know the dancer from the dance. Many critics have taken this to mean that the author cannot be separated from his work. But this line is somewhat ambiguous and could also mean the opposite that the poem is only an artistic mask for the poet. The poem through symbols and images explores several philosophical questions and themes through the contemplative wanderings of the speaker.