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13.13: The Circus Animals’ Desertion

  • Page ID
    3212
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    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[1] 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 intervened to save it.
    I thought my dear[2] 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[3] 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.

    (1938 – 1939)

    Contributors and Attributions


    1. Pronounced “Usheen,” Oisin was a hero in Irish mythology, a warrior poet, and the subject of Yeats’s early epic poem, The Wanderings of Oisin. ↵
    2. Maud Gonne, who starred not in Yeats play The Countess Cathleen, but in his 1902 play Cathleen ni Houlihan. She hated the British and was, indeed, a fanatical and active opponent of their rule in Ireland. ↵
    3. A hero in Irish mythology, and a recurring character in several of Yeats’s plays and poems. ↵

    13.13: The Circus Animals’ Desertion is shared under a CC BY license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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