Poetry Monday: Among School Children

I 

 I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; 

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

 The children learn to cipher and to sing,

 To study reading-books and history, 

To cut and sew, to be neat in everything

 In the best modern way--the children's eyes

 In momentary wonder stare upon

 A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

 V 

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

 Honey of generation had betrayed,

 And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

 As recollection or the drug decide, 

Would her son, did she but see that shape

 With sixty or more winters on its head,

 A compensation for the pang of his birth,

 Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

 VII

 Both nuns and mothers worship images,

 But those the candles light are not as those

 That animate a mother's reveries,

 But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

 And yet they too break hearts--O Presences 

That passion, piety or affection knows,

 And that all heavenly glory symbolize--

 O self-born mocker of man's enterprise;

 VIII 

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

 The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

 Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

 Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil,

 O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, 

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

 O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

 How can we know the dancer from the dance? 

 --William Butler Yeats Four stanzas from "Among School Children" (1927)

The photo above, taken recently, is of a building on S. Hamilton Ave. in Greensburg, PA that was the Sacred Heart School from 1922 to the early 1960s.  This was my first school as a first grader in 1952.  It was the first building outside my home and my grandmother's house where I'd ever spent an entire day.  I was there nearly every weekday of the school year through the fifth grade, until June 1957.  I remember details of this building as it was then, inside and out, very clearly. 

 Instead of the three windows seen in this photos, there were walls of tall windows from near the edges of the building to that arched central area on both sides of it. In height they reached from slightly above desk level to nearly the ceiling.  There were four long classrooms: two facing the street, two the back.  Another makeshift classroom was eventually assembled in the basement.  Until I started school, the basement had previously been Sacred Heart Church.  It is where I attended my first Mass, and made up little stories for myself, to explain what the Latin singing meant.  

In my time there was a kind old nun or two among the nuns our teachers.  Old to us anyway.  But there was also violence, the rule of the ruler across the outstretched hand and more, the body "bruised to pleasure soul."

Sacred Heart School was abandoned when the newly constituted St. Paul's parish finished building a modern new school just outside of Greensburg in the baby booming 60s.  That school in turn has been abandoned, as Catholic schools in the area contracted to one building complex on Main Street in Greensburg, at least part of which is quite old.  The old Sacred Heart building on Hamilton has had many tenants and uses since it ceased being a school.  For awhile the basement was a dance studio for young girls.