This article was downloaded by: [University of Georgia]On: 17 December 2014, At: 20:17Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

The ExplicatorPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

Yeats's Among School ChildrenNathan A. Cervo aa Franklin Pierce CollegePublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Nathan A. Cervo (2001) Yeats's Among School Children, TheExplicator, 60:1, 30-31, DOI: 10.1080/00144940109597160

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940109597160

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,

sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

eorg

ia]

at 2

0:17

17

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Murfin, Ross C . Introduction. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary

Ressler, Steve. Joseph Conrad: Consciousness and Integrity. New York: New York UP, 1988. Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. 3-16.

Yeats’s AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN

Yeats is a “superb” poet with respect to both his artistic skill and his super- biu (pride, one of the seven deadly sins). In “Among School Children,” the peculiarly visionary quality of Yeats’s pride is implicitly stated in the follow- ing lines:

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed [. . .] (33-34)

The key to understanding Yeats’s larger meaning in the poem is to recognize that, in the poet’s heretical parody of the traditional Byzantine icon of madon- na and child, “shape” equals flesh, “Honey of generation” equals the human animal’s procreative act, and “betrayed” signifies treasonous activity on the part of “shape” (flesh) against the pristine pleroma (the fulness of divine excellencies and powers, spiritually unblemished by existence), to which nothing can be attributed, not even being. The pleroma transcends all our notions of “being” (Latin esse).

Of this poem Yeats noted, “I have taken the ‘honey of generation’ from Por- phyry’s essay on ‘The Cave of the Nymphs,’ but find no warrant in Porphyry for considering it the ‘drug’ [line 36 of the poem] that destroys the ‘recollec- tion’ [36] of prenatal freedom” (Norton 1361). The “recollection” alluded to is Platonic anurnnesis--our participation in the intelligibles of our terrestrial world by knowing them as remembrances of the Forms that the “prenatal” soul knew before its fall into matter (“shape”). Whereas to Plato “our love (ems) of the Forms is infallibly strong enough to drive us on to successful self-improve- ment” (Rist 15 1). Yeats suggests, in keeping with Porphyry, Plotinus’s most influential pupil, that no “part of the soul is ‘undescended”’ (Rist 15 1).

Porphyry’s notion that human beings need not aspire because souls partic- ipate per se in the bliss of the pleroma led Augustine to consider Porphyry “the epitome [. . .] of the arrogant and blasphemous side of philosophy” (Rist 16). To Porphyry, there is no need to aspire to the condition of a better self through morality. All of the soul has descended, and its participatory integri- ty consists in its fully microcosmic character. The soul partakes of itself, invulnerable to inroads by the material world. As “shape,” as a projected con- figuration of matter, the body is hardly an integral manifestation, or epiphany, of the pleroma. Reduced to clarity, the body is a disease of time.

30

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

eorg

ia]

at 2

0:17

17

Dec

embe

r 20

14

In “Among School Children,” Yeats deconstructs the value of the things taught by kindly nuns to their wards. He views the endeavor nihilistically, prompted by derision that is “self-born” (56). He knows that “man’s enterprise” (56) amounts to nil, to “0’ (56). This intuition on his part is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic, especially when we understand that the intuition is that of a gnostic, whereby the futility of secularism is not locked in its own noth- ingness but glorified by visionary spontaneity. The nil of “man’s enterprise,” the secular “0,” ascends, as it were, by way of esoteric alchemy (gnosis) to the pure acknowledgment of underlying spirituality, symbolized by the (so to speak) de- habilitated figure of Uroboros, by the “0’ of the “boundary-eater” (Greek Uroboms). To Yeats, the serpent eating its own tail, Uroboros, is wisdom.

Opposed to this kind of Nietzschean wisdom is the religious machinery rep- resented by the kindly nuns, the tired and inane (to Yeats) belief in self- improvement. Arrogantly (in what would have been Augustine’s opinion of him), Yeats stenographically propounds a system of spiritual monism that would unseat the icon of the traditional mother and child with that of a “bod- iless Leda” (so to speak; see line 9, “I dream of a Ledaean body, bent”), Chris- tian sacred history with apocalyptic pagan myth.

-NATHAN A. CERVO, Franklin Pierce College

WORKS CITED

Norton Anthology of English Literarum. Ed. M. H. Abrams. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1962. Rist, John M. Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Woolf’s MRS DALLOWAY

The satire in the fox-hunting novels by Robert Surtees seemingly serves no immediate purpose in Mrs Dulloway. Surtees appears oddly associated with the ominous “Fear no more,” the funeral dirge from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in Hatchard’s window (MD 13); Pickwickian Jorrocks and slippery Soapy Sponge are apparently incongruously situated among the more serious literary characters of Woolf’s novel. At least two critics, Neuman and Welcome, men- tion the attention given Surtees in Woolf’s second Common Reader; but none attends to Jorrocks and Soapy Sponge in Mrs Dalloway. These eccentric char- acters serve, however, as vehicles for social satire, just as Surtees tosses “crit- ical darts at the world” (Neuman 40); they are prominently placed in the work that Woolf creates “to criticize the social system and to show it at its most intense” (Woolf, Diary 248).

31

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

eorg

ia]

at 2

0:17

17

Dec

embe

r 20

14