Among School Children

The poet presents time as both circular and unending, reaching back through time to the great philosophers as well as to his own birth and the childhood of the woman he loves. Opening the poem with “the best modern way” (Line 6) puts the reader firmly in the present going into the future, but then he goes back and revisits a memory from his younger days with the woman Maud Gonne, who in turn recounts a memory from her younger days—a snapshot of her childhood. He understands and sympathizes perfectly because the event could easily be from his childhood or any other’s. Then returning to the present, the speaker looks for the woman in the faces of the children before him, and for just a moment believes that he finds her, just at the cusp of growing up—past, present, and future all come together in harmony and his “heart is driven wild” (Line 23).

The fifth stanza visits the idea of the mother cradling a newborn child, who then grows to be a man—or woman, a mother herself—with white hair and a lifetime of experience. During this lifetime, they would have found themselves doing the same thing—cradling a newborn child of their own, watching them grow and asking themselves if they would do it all again. Though left open-ended, the answer to this question can only be yes, because that is what causes the cycle to continue again and again with each new generation. Moving from this place of family and humanity, the speaker considers history’s great philosophers, all of whom succumbed to old age to make way for the new.