William Butler Yeats lived a long and productive life as a great poet. One of his greatest poems, “Sailing to Byzantium,” tells how his old age has rendered him “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick.” But this diminished physical condition, at least, did not impede his creativity, as the poems in his finest collection The Tower demonstrate. Up until the last year of his life, Yeats’s creativity flowed unabated, until in this final year, his confidence was shaken as he was trying to find a theme for a new poem. Yeats struggled for weeks to find a “theme,” and then, happily, that struggle finally produced “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” (1938)
The Circus Animals' Desertion
1
I sought a theme and sought for 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.
2
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 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 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.
Payers and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
3
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 the 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)
The poem begins with Yeats being unable to find a theme for what he wants to write. He feels he is a “broken man,” and the “circus animals” that once inspired his imagination have now abandoned him in “old age.” This obvious writer’s block induces him to say, “I must be satisfied” with my heart,” which seems vague, and he then alludes with typical Yeatsian ambiguity to “stilted boys,” a “burnished chariot,” a “Lion and woman,” and “Lord knows what.” These unfamiliar references should not confuse the reader; after a lifetime of writing poems and plays, Yeats simply means he had assembled quite an array of characters who represent the themes he sought and found in the past. What to make of “I must be satisfied with my heart,” is a different matter, and can be understood by a similar reference later in the poem.
In stanza 2, at the beginning of section 2, Yeats surrenders to the writer’s block and admits, “What can I but “enumerate old themes?” He recalls “The Wandering of Oisin,” (1889) his narrative poem in which the Irish hero Oisin leaves his land to follow a fairy lady to a fairy land and then returns 150 years later to discover that all his friends are dead, and Ireland has been converted to Christianity. In stanza 3, Yeats sums up his play The Countess Cathleen, an Irish legend in which a woman sells her soul to the devil to get food for the starving people of Ireland. And in stanza 4, he recalls his play, On Baile’s Strand in which the mad Irish legendary hero Cuchulain dies fighting the ocean’s waves after he been tricked into fighting and killing his son.
Yeats did not know, as we do now, that what he was experiencing would be called a writer’s block. But could that block withstand the creative power that always kindled Yeats’s imagination? And does simply enumerating “old themes” achieve what Yeats was struggling to find? After reading the poem, the answer to both is a resounding yes. With each perfectly crafted stanza Yeats arouses in the reader a profound sympathy. We feel the ache and frustration old age inflicts on the still vibrant mind of the poet who refuses to surrender his craft and creativity. We also see and feel something special that inspired Yeats when young to create poems and plays that transcend the everyday, the commonplace. In all the stanzas that follow the initial one, Yeats remembers the passion within him that fired his imagination to write those early works. In writing Oisin, he recalls how “being “starved for the bosom of his faery bride,” in The Countess Cathleen, how the “dream itself [that] had “all my thought and love” and in On Baile Strand, how the “Players and painted stage took all my love.” It is not the themes, or the characters that make his poem[s] and plays enduring works of art, but the passion that they embody.
In section 3 of the poem, Yeats begins by observing how “Those masterful images because complete/ Grew in pure mind,” as if they were the product of some Platonic, ideal realm that forges fully formed works of art into reality. But then he swerves into a question and asks, “but out of what began?” Here he delves into the genuine source of creativity, his “heart.” And though he believes at first “being but a broken man,/I must be satisfied my heart,” since his search for “new” circus animals to conduct had failed him, he discovers through the very struggle of writing this poem and sifting through his “old themes,” that inspiration and new themes must be “sought” not abstractly, but “In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” in the deep, everyday passions that he still feels.
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