"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
About this Quote
Yeats ends “Among School Children” with a question that sounds like a compliment to art but lands like a philosophical trap. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” isn’t asking for a clever answer; it’s pressing on the human urge to separate essence from performance, soul from body, person from the roles we watch them inhabit. The line works because it refuses the comfort of categories. It’s an image that collapses a whole worldview: identity isn’t a core you can excavate, it’s something made visible only in motion, in form, in the act itself.
The context matters. Yeats, older and politically prominent, walks through a school and watches children at their most “unformed,” then spirals outward into memory, aging, desire, and the way ideals get battered by time. The poem is full of binaries that break down under pressure: youth/age, body/mind, mother/child, philosophy/lived experience. The dancer/dance metaphor is the final move, rejecting the notionufian temptation to treat life as raw material and art (or ideology) as the purified product.
Subtext: Yeats is also talking about himself - the public figure, the myth-making poet, the aging man still haunted by Maud Gonne and by the nationalist theater he helped stage. Was the “Yeats” people consumed a person or a performance? The question suggests the distinction is meaningless. Art doesn’t merely express a self; it manufactures the self we think was there all along.
The context matters. Yeats, older and politically prominent, walks through a school and watches children at their most “unformed,” then spirals outward into memory, aging, desire, and the way ideals get battered by time. The poem is full of binaries that break down under pressure: youth/age, body/mind, mother/child, philosophy/lived experience. The dancer/dance metaphor is the final move, rejecting the notionufian temptation to treat life as raw material and art (or ideology) as the purified product.
Subtext: Yeats is also talking about himself - the public figure, the myth-making poet, the aging man still haunted by Maud Gonne and by the nationalist theater he helped stage. Was the “Yeats” people consumed a person or a performance? The question suggests the distinction is meaningless. Art doesn’t merely express a self; it manufactures the self we think was there all along.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Line from the poem Among Schoolchildren by W. B. Yeats. |
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