Anyone who has ever stormed away from a best friend, certain the friendship was over, will recognise the afternoon that "Classmates" captures. Susan Bradford Eppes takes a small quarrel between two schoolgirls, Margaret and Louise, and follows it from the first sting of an insult to the moment of making up. The whole story fits into seven short stanzas, and the poem is funnier and kinder than its tearful opening suggests.
Its central idea is that adolescent feeling is intense but quickly spent, and that this does not make it any less real. The speaker never mocks Margaret's pain. Yet she lets us see, with gentle irony, what Margaret cannot: the friendship that seems destroyed at noon will be mended before the day is out. The poem holds both views at once, the girl's certainty that this is the end, and the reader's knowledge that it is not.
The construction supports this. The poem is written in quatrains with an alternating rhyme, the second and fourth lines chiming ("view" with "blue," "keen" with "mean," "flow" with "woe"). The rhythm is light and bouncing, close to a ballad or nursery song, and that bounce is slightly at odds with the drama described. Heartbreak is being set to a skipping tune, which quietly tells us not to take the catastrophe wholly at face value. The form also suits the story: a regular, repeating pattern, like the school day itself, with its bell and its routine closing over everything.
The imagery works with equal economy. The poem opens on hair, not feelings: "short brown curls" falling to shield the face. Margaret's first instinct is concealment, and the curls become a small curtain drawn against the room. Only then do we learn what they hide, "angry tears" in "eyes of blue." The insult that caused them is described through a physical image, a retort that "cut like a whip-lash keen." It is a surprisingly violent comparison for a bit of schoolyard teasing, and that is the point. To a sixteen-year-old, a careless remark from a friend really does feel like a blow. The tears then spread from her face to the page: the open book "was damp with the limpid flow." The word "limpid" is a good choice, suggesting clear, pure, almost lovely tears, which makes the grief seem both sincere and slightly decorative.
The fourth stanza turns on the arrival of the Master. "The chattering girls grow silent," and the poem shifts from private feeling to public duty. Margaret "must raise her head and wipe her eyes," and the stanza's brisk, practical tone shows how the adult world demands composure whatever is happening inside. Her mind then races through desperate options: can she pretend to be ill, can she hide the traces? She scolds herself as "a blubbering baby, / In spite of her sixteen years." That clash of "baby" and "sixteen" is the emotional centre of the poem, the awkward gap between childhood and adulthood in which Margaret is stranded.
The quotation marks around "cruel, and horrid and mean" are another telling detail. These are Margaret's own words, inflated by hurt, and the stacked adjectives sound like a girl trying to build a case against someone she loves. Her later vow, "I shall never walk with her more," is delivered with the same grand finality.
The ending delivers the poem's quiet joke. "'Tis a long, long day but it ends at last," and then, in a single stanza, everything reverses: "Two hours later with arms intwined, / They were vowing friendship forever." The word "forever" returns the earlier "never," and the two promises, equally sincere and equally sweeping, cancel each other out. Margaret's "never" lasted two hours.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a young person's emotions with respect and humour together, a combination that is harder to achieve than it looks. We laugh at Margaret a little, but we also recognise her, and so the laughter is affectionate. The poem suggests that the quick storms of youth are not trivial just because they pass; they are how friendships are tested, and how they are strengthened.