The Circus Animals' Desertion Poem by William Butler Yeats

The Circus Animals' Desertion

Rating: 3.3


I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intetvened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Monday, January 13, 2003
Topic(s) of this poem: love
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
William Stephen Doyle 19 March 2019

This is a journey through a creative life, a search for meaning and creativity. Yeat's in a way appears to dismiss his creative output; that the idealism and Gaelic Romanticism he played with and wrote about where grounded in rubbish, what is thrown away, rag and bones. It damns poetry and raises poetry; it places idealism and word-magic in the throw-away world. It is from that world, detritus; we will construct what is pure.

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Jake Baskin 25 September 2008

I love the question it asks...Where do these great works come from? They all come from very human, basic emotions, from the 'foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.' I showed this to my English teacher. He said that having taught creative writing, he had read a lot of pieces about writer's block, but that this one was the best.

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William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

County Dublin / Ireland
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