Among School Children

“Among School Children” follows an ottava rima form, a poetry type created and loved by Italian Renaissance poets and often used in epic and narrative poem stories. The ottava rima consists of several eight-line stanzas that use the rhyme scheme ABABABCC. Yeats uses this form to create eight small self-contained poems that fit together into a larger whole; each stanza explores a new idea or a new facet of the poem’s speaker—Yeats himself. This poetry form has been popular with poets such as John Keats and Percy Shelley.

Within this form the poet uses a loose iambic pentameter, which he returns to often in his work. However, there are several places where the meter deviates, most notably in the very first lines: “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; / A kind old nun in a white hood replies;” (Lines 1-2). However, the rest of the first stanza falls into a more rigid iambic pentameter: “To study reading-books and history, / To cut and sew, be neat in everything” (Lines 4-5). Through the poem, the rigidity and fluidity of the meter reflects the thoughts and feelings of the speaker, creating a sense of controlled chaos.