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 Among School Children

This is Hamilton Gallery’s sixth invited artists exhibition thematically drawing upon a major poem by W B Yeats and also timed to coincide with Ireland’s Decade of Commemoration

“Among School Children” comprises an individual work from each of 115 invited artists.

The images below are followed by the foreword to the exhibition catalogue written by poet Vona Groarke.

Among School Children

Foreword to the exhibition catalogue by Vona Groarke

Think of Ravel’s Bolero, the small certainty of the initial drum ceding to a more lyrical flute and, eventually, to the all-encompassing bravura of the full orchestra. First performed in 1928, it was commissioned by Russian dancer, Ida Rubenstein, and Ravel may even have been working on it as Yeats composed ‘Among School Children’, movement by movement, note by note, as if moving through wind, string and brass sections, testing each tone individually before orchestrating them into its resounding and pitch-perfect finale.

Just as the Bolero seems to wind itself, inexorably, up, ‘Among School Children’ intensifies as it moves through each of its eight movements of eight lines each in faultless iambic pentameter. You can almost hear it ramp up its increasing volume, notch by notch, so what starts in quiet certainty concludes in the extraordinary resonance of those final lines. What starts with one, simple, physical act (‘I walk through the long schoolroom’) quickly becomes two, (‘questioning’) and line by line, quickens into a poem that asks the kind of questions you really have to work up to asking, that you couldn’t possibly start out with, baldly, for fear of scaring readers off.
Big questions, they are. Big and rhetorical (though I have, betimes, amused myself by imagining Yeats reading this poem to a live audience, one of whom sticks up a hand at the end and says, ‘As it happens, I know how’). And perhaps not all of the thoughts are equally compelling: I, for one, remain unmoved by the catalogue of philosophers and their various exploits making up the bulk of Section VI (though I’m glad enough of the earthy touch of the posterior of that king of kings), and I find myself inherently resistant to the comparison of maternal love and religious piety.

But what of it? When the poem lands, it lands with the kind of majesty of thought and clarity of expression that clink together into irrefutabillity. There’s seems to be a great deal of wisdom in the poem, which seems odd for a poem that leans so heavily on its questions, even these extraordinarily ambitious and probing questions about how we are to live and to understand the even bigger questions of life, desire, despair, sorrow, ageing and enduring love. And time, always time, playing us for silly fools, making scarecrows of even our best selves.

Several artworks in this fascinating exhibition pluck strands of phrases from Yeats’s poem to use as starting positions or as titles of their own. Others try to respond to the poem in the round, as a whole, and to engage with its curiosity and its breath-taking range. There are rich pickings in the poem, for sure, and these artworks show them richly picked. The exhibition’s one hundred and fifteen pieces combine to show the poem enacted differently and ingeniously, using a visual language to think through its questions and preoccupations by other means.

In its translation of word to image, of phrase to line, of line to colour, this exhibition expands and amplifies our understanding of ‘Among School Children’. Each one striking, the effect of the full exhibition is to remind us how powerful the Yeats poem is, and how important a place it occupies in the Irish imagination. It is a living thing, still (after almost one hundred years) putting to us its beautiful and resonant questions that we still, in our various ways, puzzle to answer. - Vona Groarke