Among School Children

"Among School Children" is a poem used by Yeats to determine an upcoming generation with the underlying concept that no possible life can be fulfilled. The philosophy controlling this work suggests that perhaps life 'prepares us for what never happens'. Consistent with Yeatsean philosophy, it follows the dogma which states that wistlessness brings about innocence, whereas knowledge brings us ballyhoo. Within the realms of acquired wisdom, consciousness produces an anarchic state within the individual, causing conflict to be the degradation of the soul and mind. Understanding these forms of consciousness, inscape and instress, as Tenyson has termed them, causes a heightened awareness towards understanding the human spirit and the universe. According to Yeats, this understanding creates confusion and consciousness becomes conflict.

Consciousness is limited to the realms of experience. Within this experience we may understand individualities of love, death, beauty and spiritual essence. Consciousness is the awareness of one's surroundings and identity; the awareness of universal concepts and the relation this plays upon the individual.

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939), Irish poet a...

English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, St...

Yeats

Yeats believed that throughout an individuals life there were certain icons and memories which remained constant, turning in what he classified as a gyre, an ever increasing spiral of life veering towards a state of anarchy. This form of consciousness is classified within Western cosmologies as knowledge or wisdom. If one chooses to neglect this knowledge, one has not been enlightened and therefor remains much like the school children Yeats views in the poem. If one grasps these memories within the eternal wheel one is considered a knowledgeable man. He has an understanding of his own relativity within the realms of spirituality held between himself and others, as if his subconscious has been awakened and now lies within his own consciousness. He has reached a new plateau of consciousness and therefor becomes susceptible to both...