Beauty in books to boys who lean Idling on the sill of spring, Beauty to lads of seventeen In psalm and song I tried to bring.
But if one hoped to draw—I found— The tear of beauty to the eye, Innocent Hylas must be drowned And every Juliet must die.
I might despair of ever joy Being attuned to beauty’s speech, Did Death not sometimes take a boy And tutor strains I could not teach.
A schoolmaster looks back on his work. He has spent years trying to make beauty matter to restless seventeen-year-olds, reading them verse and psalms while they lounge by the window, thinking of spring and not of poetry. What he discovers is a bitter irony: the stories that actually move readers to tears are the ones where beauty is lost. Hylas, the youth of Greek myth, has to drown, and Juliet has to die, before anyone weeps.
The title tells us the speaker's pupils have drowned, and the last stanza turns that loss into something almost unbearable. Death, he admits, can teach what he never could. Without it, he might have given up on ever making young people hear beauty's language.
The mood is quiet, restrained grief, tinged with guilt and a kind of defeated honesty. The speaker never wails; he simply states, in neat, controlled rhymes, how little his own teaching could do against what death accomplishes.