Yeats “Among School Children”

In each stanza of this poem, Yeats reflects back to his past memories and compares it to the present. During his visit to the convent school, he becomes aware of the age gap and the differences between his and the children’s’ generation. He gains answers to his questions from the nuns in the school while observing the children. After looking through the eyes of a little girl, he is then reminded of his childhood love and thinks about her presence image. This eventually led him to question the value of human life and how they grow. However, he comes to an understanding of the beauty of life and the fact about how aging is inevitable. Reality is that the whole is more than its parts combined all together just like how the chestnut tree cannot be divided into leaf, blossom, and bole separately. Yeats addresses these concerns with the audience in order to share both universal viewpoints along with his self-perception of existence.