“Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird”.
These lines are from the sixth stanza of William Butler Yeats’s 1928 poem ‘Among School Children’, an account of his visit, in his capacity as an Irish senator and famous poet, to a school in Waterford. It one of Yeats’s very greatest poems—a mesmerising and melancholy summary of his life, love and work—and I cannot begin to do justice to it here. But a few words on the above lines …
Firstly, to clear some stumbling blocks. “Thaws” are leather straps once used to discipline schoolchildren by flogging. Pythagoras is “golden-thighed” as per a story preserved in a fragment of Aristotle, that he had a golden thigh, and displayed it at the Olympic Games. Yeats’s details can be startling, but they are almost always rooted in something precise.
Yeats’s details can be startling, but they are almost always rooted in something precise.
Indeed much of the power of these lines comes from saying a number of precise and well-known things, but in entirely original ways. Yeats is offering here a few core elements from the biographies and doxographies of ancient philosophers, items retailed countless times from antiquity onwards. He is telling us of Plato’s theory of the eternal Forms, of which the visible, natural world is but a pale shadow. He then reminds us of Aristotle’s tutoring of Alexander the Great, and putative redirecting of philosophy away from the Forms, and towards the material world (“plays .. played” join Plato’s evanescent nature to Aristotle’s biting thaws). Lastly, he brings up Pythagoras’ notion that all music and harmony is in a continuum with the harmonious movements of the heavenly bodies, the so-called “music of the spheres”.
Yeats’s wrote for readers who knew all this material about the philosophers, and of course the lines will be utterly baffling to those who don’t. But they are at first sight baffling, or at least arresting, also for those to whom the rudiments of Greek philosophy are perfectly familiar, because those rudiments had never before been presented as Yeats does here.
The rudiments of Greek philosophy had never before been presented as Yeats does here
In reference to Plato’s Forms, we are asked to imagine the physical world as a “spume”—the mind is drawn to the sea-shore, the white surf crashing against the rocks or melting away as ones tries to grasp it. Aristotle is no longer just Raphael’s downward-pointing bearded sage (in another schoolroom): he is engaged in the earthy, ugly task of flogging a little boy on the arse. And yet that little boy is a “king of kings”, the great Eastern title applied even to Christ. Pythagoras, made numinous by his two rolling double epithets, is then brought to earth, almost to Ireland, with his fingers and fiddle. And he plays not the “music of the spheres”, a phrase so trite as to be deadened, but “what a star sang”. From this we are taken to Yeats’s own craft: he is himself a nursling of the “careless Muses”.
And so, as Yeats’s wandering mind returns to the classroom, he comes back to the center of the poem as the stanza ends: “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird” rephrases what he had called himself three stanzas earlier, “a comfortable kind of old scarecrow”. All his philosophical lore has not made him more than that, and perhaps the old Greeks themselves are just earlier incarnations of the scarecrow, all their wisdom just rags in the eyes of the truly wise (if there be such).
The lines are ingenious. But they are also deeply affecting. The sad but unbroken old man in the schoolroom, surrounded by children, casts his mind back over the span of his own life, and over the thousands of years of empires risen and fallen, wisdom and its questions preserved and reinvented. Is it all, even these fresh-faced, hopeful children, just sea-foam melting away? Is it bound together by an eternal music? The familiar—both the classroom and the old philosophers—has been made unfamiliar, strange and wondrous, as it is to every child: the poet has done his work.
