While dealing with Yeats’s enigmatic question (and importantly the trail of experience leading up to it) Cleanth Brooks makes the following synthesis between “Among School Children” and Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode”:
The mature man can see the harmony, the unity of being, possessed by the tree or the lamb or the child; but the price of being able to see it is not to possess it in one’s self, just as the price of possessing it in one’s self is an awareness that one does not possess it (The Well Wrought Urn, 190).
a trash can full of print 