“Old Clothes Upon Old Sticks to Scare a Bird” Discuss the Way in Which Yeats Approaches Age in Among School Children

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Among School Children appears to be a very negative poem when being read as it speaks of how age has such a negative effect on everyone and speaks of how his life seems meaningless to some people. However the last stanza does appear to become more positive over growing age and holds one of the most important lines in the poem “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” The poem starts off speaking about Yeats himself visiting a school when he was sixty years old and the poem states “the children’s eyes in a momentary wonder stare upon a sixty-year-old smiling public man” We are now seeing a poet through the eyes of a child and we do not know who the poet is. To all the schoolchildren this man, Yeats, is just a stranger to them who they do not care about of look up to. It is quite a bleak outlook of Yeats as he is saying no matter what accomplishments you achieve in life, you will start to be forgotten about as you grow older, you will not become as recognised or idolised as you were before. This philosophical approach of Yeats who is looking at himself through another person’s eyes appears to be telling him that now he is an old man, he is starting to be forgotten about and is just another old man to everybody else. It is a very dark outlook on age, which we also see in the fifth stanza in which Yeats says “What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap honey of generation had betrayed and that must sleep, shriek, struggle” Yeats is speaking of the pain of childbirth which every mother has to go through, the most painful year of a mother’s life. He then goes on to say “Would think her Son, did she but see that shape with sixty or more winters on its head” this is once again a very negative view of age as Yeats is saying as he has gotten older, does his or any mother regret childbirth for what had come of it, was all the pain and suffering for those nine months worth

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