Context
This poem was written after a visit by Yeats in his capacity as a Senator to St Otteran’s School, Waterford in 1926. The school was run on Montessori principles.
Structure
The poem is 8 stanzas long with 8 lines per stanza. It is also written in ottava rima, a verse form Yeats used in Sailing to Byzantium. The subject matter is appropriate for this verse form – the changing face of man and mortality.
Stanza 1
Yeats walks through the school in the company of Mother Philomena who ran the school. He lists the children’s activities – reading, singing, history, sewing – and notes their staring at the ‘sixty year old smiling public man’ – Yeats himself.
The descriptive phrase ‘long schoolroom’ gives a sense of space. There is also a sense of pace; it will take time to walk through a ‘long schoolroom’. Another descriptive phrase, ‘kind old nun’, could be seen as a description of most nuns in Ireland, at least in the public mind.
The phrase ‘the best modern way’ shows the progressive nature of Montessori education. This is a child driven system of education with children choosing the activities they wanted to do within a framework. The phrase ‘momentary wonder’ shows that the children are caught up in a moment of wonder staring at their visitor. They probably had no idea who he was.
