Friedrich Hiddemann, “The School Inspector”
Thursday
Earlier this week I found myself standing “among school children” while visiting Polona Ramšak’s 8th grade English class in Celje, Slovenia. Polona, the foster mother of an exchange student who lived with us (you can read about their extraordinary story here), had invited me to answer their questions about America, which I did for over an hour. Looking back at the experience, my mind drifted naturally to Yeats’s poem of that name, which showed me the wider ramifications of the visit.
As the poem begins, however, it appears that Yeats’s visit to a girls school will be a downer. He was in his sixties at the time, a member of newly liberated Ireland’s Senate. Looking at the pupils, he feels acutely the difference in age and describes himself as “a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.” It was not so when, as a child, he played with Maud Gonne, who would become his poetic muse. He remembers Maud and him blending “into a sphere,” like the yolk and white of an egg, over some childhood disappointment.
In Symposium, Plato describes humans being traumatically split into two so that we experience life as frustrated desire, which is how Yeats feels at the moment. Maud, once beautiful like these little girls, is now “hollow of cheek,” and the poet isn’t doing so well himself. He imagines his mother, if she could see him now, wondering whether it was worth going through “the pang of his birth,/Or the uncertainty of his setting forth.”
In other words, he’s feeling his age, and not in a good way. He thinks of various philosophers and concludes that they don’t handle the aging process well. Plato thought we were eternal forms but these just strike Yeats as just so much ocean form (“spume”). Pythagoras may have believed humans are moved by the music of the spheres, but sometimes we here below are little more than fiddles and our muses are “careless.” Aristotle, the most down to the earth of the three, had to spank young Alexander the Great to get him to learn. In other words, there’s not much uplifting about mortal human beings.
In the end, however, Yeats feels better about his aging by thinking of these young people and himself as participants in a great dance. If, rather than trying to force ourselves into some mold, we listen to the creative energies within us, it doesn’t matter how old or young we the dancers are. A blossoming tree can’t be reduced to “the leaf, the blossom or the bole.” The splits that come with aging are not a problem after all.
Though I didn’t think of my own 67 years as I visited Polona’s class, I was invigorated as I watched the students use their newly acquired powers of a foreign language to learn about an exotic country. Had I met celebrities, they asked me, and why are Americans always killing each other with guns? How do I celebrate Christmas? Is all of California burning up? Do all Americans do drugs? Where do American Indians live and what do they think about Thanksgiving? Are Americans friendly?
Their world is opening up and mine is deepening. Together we swayed to the music of the dance.
Among School Children (1926)
By William Butler Yeats
I
I 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 everything
In the best modern way—the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age—
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something 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.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind—
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The 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?