The first stanza of “Among School Children” opens with an accessible, conversational tone that’s unusual for Yeats’s work, and an effective contrast to the more multi-layered stanzas as the poem progresses. The poet, an aging politician, walks through a girls’ school asking questions of the nuns who work there. He oversees the children’s work as they learn in “the best modern way” (Line 6); this is a reference to the Montessori method which had been recently implemented in this school and others like it. The stanza closes with the images of a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” (Line 8), showing the contrast between the poet’s age and the children’s youth. Despite the age difference, however, the scene is a positive one; the nun is kind and the poet smiles, giving us a warm and lighthearted atmosphere as the poem begins.

In the second stanza the politician’s mind begins to wander as he remembers the woman he loves—not as she is now, but when they were young and she had a body as beautiful as Leda’s from the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, a story which Yeats also visited in more of his work.