The text to be commented upon is a poem by Stephen Spender, called "An Elementary School Classroom", and was written during the Twentieth Century. This poem, regular with two stanzas of eight lines enclosing two stanzas of seven lines in blank verse revealing a ordinary, usual sight, depicts a classroom, with children who might be between 8 and 15 years old. These children are children from working class and the poet shows the world they could discover through the education given at school. But we could mainly wonder how Stephen Spender, in a simple picture of one single classroom, manages to deal with different stakes, and how the reader can find different levels of reading, at first sight the reader can discover a real painting of the living conditions of children from poor families, but then he can note that the issue of education is dealt with in this poem, which is a kind of apology of an almighty education, able to reveal a new world, but at last it is a real denunciation of the impossibility to escape one's environment and the admission of the failure of school, and of literature and poetry with it in changing someone's life.
Indeed, the reader is first confronted with the depiction of poor, maybe dirty little classroom and its inhabitants. One might first note the environment : depressing and squalid, as the metaphor revealing the colour of the walls: "sour cream walls" indicates a nauseating place, in which no one would like to stay, the adjective "dim" also shows it is not a pleasant place but a place of work, in which eyes become tired. In the third stanza we can also see the word "slag" used to express the place in which the pupils are: dirty, a dead-end for children, where nothing can bring light. In the same stanza is described, again, their "space", highlighted by the pronoun "all", beginning the line, and it appears not only as "slum" but even "foggy slum", not a precise place, everything in it is doubtful, blurred, might as well not exist...