Yeats - Among School Children

 

Among Leaving Certificate students actually. It's fun to act as Yeats and answer questions about his poems.

Yeats is so difficult to pin down and his poems have such variety of topic and mood that he's quite difficult to study. Also very much a public man engaged in the history of his time.

They knew the poems, and some had favourites - An Irish Airman Foresees his Death - and one they didn't like - The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

I was asked why I changed my mind about the Irish middle classes between September 1913 and Easter 1916 referring to those two poems. Difficult!!


The costume, such as it was, was fun. The beard was out of place of course but I did remember to turn off my mobile telephone apparatus.

I was able to boast about my poems being included in this new iPhone app.

It's actually interesting to see what Yeats poems are on the Leaving Certificate higher level syllabus:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
September 1913
The Wild Swans at Coole
An Irish Airman Foresees his Death
Easter 1916
The Second Coming
The Stare’s Nest by My Window
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
Swift’s Epitaph
An Acre of Grass
from Under Ben Bulben: V and VI
Politics

That's a great selection and covers his life's well well apart from Maud and the love poems. An Acre of Grass, Swift' Epitaph and Politics are unexpected choices but interesting.