A Descriptive Analysis of Louise Glück’s “The School Children”
Alan Friesen
1. Meaning
The poem is about a group of mothers who give up their (kindergarten? grade one?)
children to a school. The children learn in silence and the mothers are forced to “draw… to
themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees” (13) instead of their children, indicating on the
surface that the mothers miss them.
2. Antecedent Scenario
The reason why these children are going to school is likely because they’re now old enough
to do so. They cannot remain with their mothers because 1) they’re required to be in school,
and 2) the mothers are working in the orchards, picking apples.
3. A Division into Structural Parts
The poem is already divided into four stanzas, which (luckily for us) are meaningful
divisions within the story of the poem. The first and last stanzas act as introductions and
conclusions, respectively: the former draws us into the action of the poem (think of the
beginning of a film when a camera slowly zooms in on a city) and the latter takes us away
from the action (again, the end of a film where the camera zooms out).
-Stanza one: the children are going to school. Mothers go to the orchards to gather
apples.
-Stanza two: on “the other shore”, teachers wait “behind great desks” to receive the
“offerings [from the mothers]” of… what? Apples? Children?
-Stanza three: the children hang their overcoats in neat rows (I noticed the
enjambment here for the first time as I wrote this)
-Stanza four: the teachers instruct the silent children, and the mothers are left
looking for “a way out” while they tend to the orchards
4. The Climax
The climax of this poem is, in my mind, ambiguous: is it when the children are being
instructed in silence? When the mothers desire to scour the orchards “for a way out”?
When the loss is indicated in the mothers “drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit
trees”? The rhetorical repetition of the word “and” at the beginning of two successive lines
in the fourth stanza indicates that therein lies the climax as it marks a shift in rhythm from
the rest of the poem.
5. The Other Parts
-Stanza one is different from the rest of the poem as it shows the last time that the
children are free. They “go forward” (1) to school, a phrase that sounds unwilling
and gives no connotations of excitement. They are obviously not excited to go to
school. The mothers are in the orchards (seen again in stanza four), but we have a
curious simile at the end of this stanza: the apples are “like words of another
language.”
-Stanza two is different from the rest of the poem because it describes the teachers
for the first time, labeling the division between the parents and the teachers as a gulf
with water between (5). The difference between these two groups, this line implies,
is great. The mothers give and the teachers receive “offerings” (7), indicating that
the teachers are more powerful than the mothers—does one give an offering to a
person of lesser status?
-Stanza three is different from the rest of the poem because describes the clothing
being worn by the students and how they’re hung up in orderly rows. The
synecdoche here is obvious: the wool clothing (either in blue or yellow wool,
indicating little variation) represents the children, implying that they too will sit in
orderly rows in silence.
-Stanza four is different from the rest of the poem because it shows that the students
are controlled by the teachers instead of being loved by the mothers, and the
mothers miss their children. The transfer of “control” from one side to the “other
shore” (5) is complete.
6. Find the Skeleton
The curve of emotion travels from neutrality (or indifference) to loss. The children “go
forward” to school: implies unwillingness but doesn’t outright connote this. The mothers
“labour… / to gather the late apples” (2-3), an act which is neither portrayed as negative
nor positive. There is no power relationship evident in the poem until the teachers wait “to
receive these offerings” (7), at which point it becomes clear that the mothers are inferior to
the teachers, as are the children when they are forced to hang up their overcoats (9-10)
and sit in silence (11). At the end of the poem, the mothers “scour the orchards for a way
out” (12). They are not happy with how events have transpired and want to escape. In the
next line, as they “draw to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees” (13), the “scouring”
mentioned earlier in the stanza is modified: it seems as if the speaker is telling us that the
mothers want an escape from themselves and for their children.
Is school the escape, or do the mothers want their children to escape from school? The
poem is ambiguous on this point, though we can infer from the language and tone of the
poem that the mothers are not happy with the loss of their children.
7. Games the Poet Plays with the Skeleton
School is not often associated with loss. Young children in particular see the first few years
of school as exciting and interesting. My daughter, upon learning that kindergarten was
over, burst into tears because she loved it so much. Yet the mothers in this poem are not
happy at the end of the poem and are in fact looking for “a way out.” Education is typically
seen as an escape from poverty and ignorance, and a path to a better life. In this poem,
education does not have the connotation of freedom but of imprisonment: “great desks” (6),
“orderly… nails” (8), and “instruct[ing] in silence” (11) all have negative connotations when
taken together. School is not a place of hope but a place where hope is lost. This is unusual
in poetry.
8. Language
a. Structure
The poem has five sentences. All of the stanzas contain a single sentence, except for the first
which contains one in the first line and another in the remaining three lines. This first line,
then, is unusual, as its structure is short and to the point. Grammatically, the first line is a
simple sentence; the second sentence contains a parenthetical clause (“red and gold” (3));
the fourth contains an example of anacoluthon and thus is more complex than the first; and
the fifth is a compound sentence.
But what of the third? This sentence is also considered a simple sentence, with no
dependent clauses or independent clauses joined with a conjunction. Therefore, it is
structurally similar to the first sentence. Notice the similarities: the children go forward,
the teachers wait. The children are on one side of the shore, while the teachers are on the
other. Although the mothers are the principal actors in the poem, the children and the
teachers are obviously on opposite sides.
The parallelism in the last stanza (“And the teachers shall [verb]… and the mothers shall
[verb]” (11-12)) is also a purposeful structure to illustrate the contrast between these two
groups of people. The teachers instruct the children, while the mothers look for a way out.
Obviously the teachers have the upper hand as they are not striving to escape from their
situations. This purposeful example of parallelism, particularly as it comes in the last stanza,
draws our attention to the power struggle between the teachers and mothers.
b. Parts of speech/c. Chains of significant relation
It seems to me that strong verbs dominate this poem: “go forward”, “laboured… / to gather”,
“wait… / to receive”, “hang”, “shall instruct”, “shall scour”, “drawing to themselves”,
“bearing”. Looking just at these verbs, I am struck at the connotations of military life. If I
didn’t know better, I would have thought that the poem was about soldiers instead of
children. This is further reinforced with the nouns “satchels”, “nails,” “overcoats”, and
“ammunition,” as well as the adjective “orderly”.
But the verbs taken by themselves also remind me of childbirth, “labour[ing]”, “wait[ing]”,
and “bearing”, in particular. Given that this poem is very much about motherhood and loss,
this association is not surprising.
d. Contexts
The contexts of the children shift from being with their mothers to (metaphorically) going
to the other shore to sit orderly in a classroom with teachers. The mothers’ contexts shift
from being with their children to being without.
e. Diction
The word choice in this poem is fairly conventional, but there are some curious synonyms
used: “satchel”, for instance, carries with it a British connotation, but the poet is American.
Thus, her choice in calling this tool of carrying books a satchel as opposed to a backpack is
purposeful. In my opinion, the military connotation (and the same can be said with
ammunition, orderly, overcoats, etc.) of “satchel” is most definitely purposeful.
The enjambment on line 9 is also something worth noting: “the nails / on which the
children hang” (8-9) leaves us at first wondering why these teachers are crucifying these
children like Christ before the thought continues on line 10 with “their overcoats.” This
brief line break immediately conjures up images of Christ, an innocent killed for the sins of
others, often referred to as the Lamb—and note that the children’s overcoats are made of
wool!
That the mothers are picking apples is also not a coincidence, what with apples being
associated with the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden and the loss of innocence in Adam
and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The mothers
pick the instruments of the loss of innocence as the children lose their innocence as they go
to school to become educated and wise in the ways of the world.
Of course, the gift of an apple to a teacher is a traditional symbol in contemporary culture.
The ambiguity of the word “these” in the phrase “these offerings”, however, does not
clearly deliniate the offerings as apples. Because of this ambiguity, the reader is free to
adapt the interpretation of sacrifice-as-child, as above.
9. Tone
As noted earlier, the tone of this poem travels from neutrality to loss: the relative neutrality
of the students going to school and mothers working in orchards, to the teachers waiting to
receive offerings, to the students hanging their coats in orderly rows, to the students being
taught in silence while the mothers look for a way out and substitute the embraces of their
children with the embraces of the trees bearing apples.
10. Agency and Speech Acts
It may be repetitive to discuss this at this point, but in short, the agency in the poem lies
with the teachers: they “wait”, force students to hang up their overcoats in “orderly” rows,
and “instruct [the children] in silence”. Compare this with the students who “go forward”
and sit “in silence”, and the mothers who “labour” and “scour the orchards for a way out”.
The students have no voice while the teachers most definitely do. Metaphorically, the
mothers have no voice, no choice, as their children must go to school. The poem is
ambiguous as to whether this choice is positive or negative.
11. Roads Not Taken
Immediately I consider two alternative ways that the poet could have structured this poem:
plural instead of singular, and perspective of teachers rather than mothers.
a. Plural / Singular
The poet chose to create groups of people (children, mothers, teachers) rather than
individuals (child, mother, teacher). This has the effect of making the poem less personal.
Imagine if the poem was about a single child going off to school, a single mother staying
behind and seeking a way out, and a single teacher awaiting the student. This would make
the poem a more intimate examination of the content of the poem, that of students leaving
their mothers and being dominated by teachers. The effect of the plural is that of solidarity:
mothers console each other at the loss of their children, the children stand united (or stand
defeated), and the teachers stand together as the operators of power within the poem. But
solitary characters are more human, less confident, less dominant: a single teacher might
be more inclined to be gentle to a solitary, sorrowful child. A solitary mother might feel
more worry over the loss of her single child.
The plural, being more objective and less personal, tells us the story of groups of people,
and therefore makes the experience universal rather than individual. It is easier to relate to
universal experiences than personal experiences, which indicates to me that the poet is
trying to convey the negativity of the mothers’ experiences in such a way so as to be more
broadly effective than portraying the experience of a single mother.
b. Perspective of teachers rather than mothers
The poet chose to write from the perspective of mothers than teachers, the other operator
of power within the poem. Imagine how this might be different: teachers waiting behind
desks for students to arrive, helping them hang up their coats, and then lecturing them
while the students sit in silence. We might tend to be more sympathetic towards the
teachers if the poem was written from their perspective: seeing experiences from another’s
eyes tends to have this effect. That the poem was not written from this perspective
indicates to me that we are not to view the teachers sympathetically: they silently wait and
loudly teach, but we are not privy to their emotions, but rather only their actions. If the
poem was written from the perspective of teachers, the curve of emotion would be quite
different.
12. Genre, Form, and Rhythm
The formal genre of the poem is free verse, and lacks a rhyme scheme. The content genre of
the poem, in my opinion, would be a political poem as the poet is discussing the agenda of
schooling. Certainly the poem has a contrarian opinion on the value of school for small
children: all teenagers hate school, as we know, but children, as discussed before, tend to
enjoy elementary school, especially when they are young. The poet discusses school in a
negative context and with negative connotations, perhaps expecting her readers to agree
with her and reconsider their positive predilections towards (public?) schooling.
The poem is written in third person and consists mainly of narration in the present tense.
There is one exception to this: the eighth line contains an exclamation of sorts in the first
part of the anacoluthic phrase of “How orderly they are”, referring to the nails on which the
children hang their overcoats. This observation is the sole moment in the poem when the
speaker steps out from more-or-less impersonal narration to a more specific observation:
not about the children, nor mothers, nor teachers, but the nails. Remembering our early
conversation about the allusion to Christ in this very stanza, it is fitting that once again our
eyes are drawn to the idea that the children are seen as sacrifices, offerings, from the
mothers to the teachers.
13. The Imagination
When considering this poem, and after writing six pages on these fourteen lines, what
strikes me the most is the poem’s silence. The mothers do not talk, nor do the children, and
even the teachers wait silently (or so we assume) until the very last stanza. Indeed, the only
sound present in the poem is when the teachers instruct the children, and even this is
tempered by the silence of the children. What does it mean, all of this silence? Are the
mothers and children silent because they have no power? Are the teachers initially silent
because they are contemplating what they will do to the children once they arrive? For a
poem about school, sounds of laughter, play, shouts, screaming, and soft voices are
conspicuously absent.
I’ve mentioned above the allusions to Christ: the teachers await the “offerings” (7) of
children from the mothers, and the narrator notes the order of “the nails / on which the
children hang / their overcoats of blue or yellow wool” (8-10). In this poem, the children
are sacrificed to the teachers. In the New Testament, Christ is executed because he
threatens the political control of the Jewish leaders of the time, refusing the refute the title
of the Son of God and therefore the Messiah, the chosen one to lead the Jewish people out of
the bondage of the Romans as Moses did with the Egyptians in the Hebrew Scriptures.
So what is threatening in this poem? The children, or the mothers? The simile on the fourth
line notes that the apples are “like words of another language” (4), and in context it is hard
not to compare the field workers with the migrant workers present in the United States
who do speak “another language,” a different language than English. Put together, perhaps
the different culture of the mothers is a threat to the fabric of American society, and just as
the First Nations children of Canada were “de-Indianised” in residential schools, perhaps
the children in this poem are being deculturated. Christ, in the Bible, is innocent as he is
killed; the children in this poem are innocent as they are “offered” to the teachers of school.
Note too the last word in the poem: “ammunition.” In context, the “ammunition” refers to
the apples being collected by the mothers, but again it is hard not to see the military
connotation: children are forced to go to school, mothers look for a way out, and the apples
are referred to as “ammunition.” Is this a vague implication of threat, of immigrant mothers
attempting to find an escape for themselves and their children through violence? Is the
threat economic rather than violent: mothers who refuse to work until their children have
escaped? Or perhaps the poem is more positive than that, with the mothers allowing to
turn over their children to teachers so that they can escape while the mothers search for
their own way out, each apple collected being another piece of ammunition put towards
their ticket out.
Perhaps relevant to our purposes is that the word “ammunition” comes from the Middle
French phrase “la munition” and adapted into French into “l’ammunition”, a mistake
perhaps incurred due to the influence of the French word “admonition”, meaning “warning.”
The mothers, lacking ammunition, also lack admonition—warning—of what will happen to
their children should they continue to attend school.
Conclusion:
It seems to me that this poem is bleak, with students sacrificed by their working-class
mothers to middle-class teachers to be educated. The mothers are left without an escape of
their own, able only to “scour the orchards for a way out” (12) rather than the classroom,
or the boardroom, or any place other than their working-class environs. The children have
no agency as they “go forward” (1) to school and are instructed “in silence” (11). The poem
is largely narrated in silence, with the only sound coming from the teachers as they instruct
(11). The military overtones of the poem are impossible to ignore, suggesting the potential
for an armed conflict between the groups of people, or perhaps simply suggesting that the
mothers and teachers are at odds much like two opponents in war—or a group of guerrilla
fighters against a highly-organised army, with the innocents, the children, caught in the
middle.