The School Children by Louise Glück
"The School Children" by Louise Glück is a poem that explores the complex relationships between children, their mothers, and their teachers, illustrating themes of disconnection and the passage of innocence. The poem opens with a depiction of children, symbolically innocent yet methodical, as they move forward with their satchels, participating in a ritualistic exchange of apples from mothers to teachers. This act, while seemingly nurturing, highlights the emotional distance between the children and their educators. The mothers labor to gather the apples, suggesting a deeper yearning for their children's success and connection with authority figures. Teachers, described as awaiting these offerings behind imposing desks, symbolize the judgment and expectations placed upon both the children and their work. The imagery of primary colors associated with childhood—blue, yellow, and red—further emphasizes both the innocence of the children and the weight of adult aspirations. Ultimately, the poem captures a sense of longing and quiet desperation, as mothers scour orchards for means to ensure their children’s futures, while the teachers remain detached, reflecting the often unbridgeable gap between parental hopes and educational realities.
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The School Children by Louise Glück
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1975 (collected in The First Four Books of Poems, 1995)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The School Children,” from The House on Marshland, contains fragmented imagery and phrasing to show the disconnection of the children to both their mothers and their teachers, despite the ritual of the mother giving the apple to the child, who then gives it to the teacher. The children, the speaker says, “go forward with their little satchels,” innocent yet businesslike. The mothers who “have labored to gather the late apples, red and gold” are the agents who smooth the way for their children to develop relationships with their teachers.
The teachers “wait behind great desks . . . to receive these offerings” and perhaps pass judgment on them, as they do the students’ work. The next line, “How orderly they are” at first appears to refer to the teachers but is then found to describe “the nails on which the children hang their overcoats of blue or yellow wool.” The blue and yellow, along with the red apples, convey the primary colors associated with childhood.
The children are further disconnected from the teachers who, the speaker says, “shall instruct them in silence,” while the mothers “scour the orchards for a way out.” Here the image of the detached teacher is contrasted with the desperation of the mother who perhaps lives vicariously through her children and the success she desires for them. This is further shown in the description of the “gray limbs of the fruit trees bearing so little ammunition,” as if the apples are not only offerings but weapons against those who the mothers believe hold their children’s destinies in their hands.
Bibliography
Diehl, Joanne Feit, ed. On Louise Glück: Change What You See. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Dodd, Elizabeth. “Louise Glück: The Ardent Understatement of Postconfessional Classicism.” In The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.
Harrison, DeSales. The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Upton, Lee. Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2005.
Upton, Lee. “Fleshless Voices: Louise Glück’s Rituals of Abjection and Oblivion.” In The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.