Academic vs. Intuitive Learning

At the heart of “Irish Poetry,” beneath its satirical humour, is the dichotomy between the enforced academic knowledge that the speaker is absorbing at school and the more intuitive, emotional knowledge they gain from communing with the world around them. The school as an academic institution is given prominence in the third stanza; although this would likely be a rural environment in which the school would be very small, a handful of local families, it’s given a church-like status within the community. It’s described as a “pious and nictitating preeminence” (Line 10), adjectives which give it a feeling of elevated grandeur. This suggests that within the speaker’s limited world, the school and everything it stands for in the wider world dominates.

The following stanza, however, inverts this image and calls the concept into question. It’s “Only later” that “the whorled...