Tone and Imagery in The School Children Louise Gluck's The School Children may provide some shock to readers as it winds through a school day marked by disturbing anomalies. Gluck successfully uses visual imagery to convey deeper meaning to a fourteen-line poem about children, teachers, and parents. These three groups come to life through the descriptive poem that allows readers to draw their own conclusions. Although Gluck's meaning is never clearly stated, his use of tone and imagery creates a highly visual work with three dynamic sets of characters. Gluck continually presents schoolchildren as simple, orderly creatures. He portrays them walking to school with their book bags and later in the poem highlights the neat arrangement of their coats within their classroom. This order helps readers perceive children as wooden dolls or mindless beings who follow instructions. Gluck writes, How are the nails on which children hang their blue or yellow wooden coats arranged (8-10). These lines are divided to present a picture of children hanging neatly on nails before the reader reaches the final line which describes their clothes and shows the powerful images created by Gluck. It is important to note that the children are described as having only two different styles of coats: a yellow wool coat, perhaps for girls, and a blue wool coat, most likely for boys. Gluck lets readers imagine a flock of tidy children wearing similar clothes while sitting in their classroom. Together with the students inside the class there are the teachers, who Gluck describes...... in the center of the paper ......June Cleaver makes the figure who is sending a sign of appreciation to her son's teacher. Instead, they are portrayed as desperate creatures searching for any sign of hope in an environment filled with darkness. The descriptions of these three groups of characters through visual imagery provided an important element in Gluck's creation of The School Children, which is part of his larger work, The House on Marshland, written in 1971. Through visual imagery he creates a combination of characters who help readers interpret the possible meanings underlying the work. Gluck successfully uses schoolchildren, teachers and mothers as vehicles for different interpretations of his work. In the process, he creates dynamic characters that we are able to understand through symbolism and imagery.