The Circus Animals' Desertion

By W.B. Yeats

Education Links

Leaving Cert

Maths
French
English
Chemistry
Physics
Biology
Economics
Spanish
Geography
History

Junior Cert

This poem was composed between November 1937 and September 1938. Its primary theme is one which confronts all creative artists at some stage in their careers - loss of inspiration. Thus the poem belongs with some famous expressions of the theme of failure in literature - Milton's 'When I Consider how my Light is Spent' and Coleridge's 'Dejection Ode' - in demonstrating the irony of a poet's ability to write a good poem in the very act of explaining why he cannot do so. Y eats originally entitled the poem 'On Despair' and then 'On the Lack of Theme' before he decided finally on the present title. The idea may well have come from a series of illustrations done by his brother Jack for the Cuala Press, owned by Yeats' sisters, Lollie and Lily.

In the poem's opening movement, the first verse, Yeats' almost hysterical reaction to his loss of inspiration is effectively expressed through repetition and trinity I sought I sought I sought Assonance of mournful 'ay', 'ah', 'oh', sounds further emphasises his gloomy state of mind


Vain	daily	Maybe	age

Last	man	heart	chariot

So	old	broken	Those	 knows

The poet's problem is exacerbated by the fact that he is now an aged man, broken physically by the years and psychologically by despair. Yeats claims that earlier in his career, till old age began, he had little difficulty finding themes to inspire him. My circus animals were all on show The circus animals symbolise the characters in his earlier poems and plays. Thus Yeats poignantly images himself as an old ringmaster, standing alone in the circus-ring (the fictional world he creates for his characters), cracking his whip, but with no animals to control as they have abandoned him. The stilted boys are the unconvincing lovers of his early Celtic Twilight period; and the burnished chariot is an allusion to Cuchulainn, Yeats' favourite character in Celtic myth. The distancing words, those and that, suggest the poet is now embarrassed by his earlier work and is dissociating himself from it. There is also a hint of self-mockery in the dismissive comment and the Lord knows what. The Lion and woman is a reference to the Sphinx, a mythical creature, half-lioness, half-woman, from Greek mythology. She appears in his poem, 'The Second Coming', and in his translation of Sophocles', 'Oedipus the King'. The septuagenarian poet sadly concludes that Maybe at last he should find future inspiration in his own emotional life, in his heart.

In the opening line of the poem's second movement (the three central verses) Yeats asks despairingly What can I but enumerate old themes? He then proceeds to evaluate three of his earlier works, one poem and two plays, dating significantly from the period 1889-1904, from just before he met Maud Gonne to just after she married John McBride.

'The Wanderings of Oisin' (1889) is a long, narrative poem in three parts, describing Oisin's love-affair with the beautiful enchantress, Niamh Cinn Oir. She carries the infatuated hero away on horseback to Tir na nOg. There they visit three enchanted islands, each for one hundred years. The first island is the Country of the Young, of Niamh's father Aengus, god of youth, beauty and poetry. On the second island (of the Living) Oisin saves a mysterious girl who is chained to eagles and he goes on to fight a demon. The third island the lovers visit is the Island of Forgetfulness where Oisin is put under a spell and he falls asleep. Awakened by the song of a starling, the hero finds that the spell Niamh had cast over him is broken. When he returns alone to the real world, Oisin finds it greatly changed.

The three islands represent youth, middle age and old age - the poet as lover, man of action, thinker. However, Yeats in retrospect dismisses the poem as a failure because it was a creation of the mind, not based on the poet's own emotional experience. The man who wrote about Oisin's love for Niamh was himself starved of love and so his heart was frustrated, embittered. It is important to note that Niamh is not Maud Gonne. The poet did not meet her until shortly after the poem was published. However, looking back with hindsight in 1938 Yeats may well feel that Niamh's leading of Oisin by the nose foreshadowed his own subsequent domination by Maud. Ironically he met her as a direct result of writing the poem. She read it, was enthralled, and secured an introduction to the poet through their mutual friend, John O' Leary. Life in this instance imitated art. Verbal repetition cleverly hammers home Yeats' dissatisfaction with the poem. Vain vain vain Distancing achieves the same effect, that sea-rider Oisin.

'The Countess Cathleen' (1891) was begun shortly after Yeats met Maud Gonne. The play deals with the Faustian theme of a heroine who sells her soul to the devil to provide food for the starving people of Ireland during the Great Famine. The Countess is eventually forgiven by God because her intention was good. Maud had become ill as a result of overwork in helping the peasants of Donegal and Mayo who were threatened with famine and eviction. Yeats calls the theme of his play a counter truth because it did come from real life, unlike 'The Wanderings of Oisin'. The poet feared that Maud Gonne, my dear, would, like the Countess, put her political soul at risk through her fanatical devotion to the nationalist cause and her hatred of England. This verse recalls his bitter condemnation of her political activities in an earlier poem, 'A Prayer for My Daughter', written on the occasion of his daughter Anne' s birth (1919). An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind? And in 'Easter 1916' he expresses his fear of the emotional damage that fanatical devotion to an ideal can inflict Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart. Yeats may well feel that just as he himself has neglected the feelings of his own heart for an ideal of art, so Maud has neglected hers for an ideal of a free Ireland. However, in spite of being inspired by personal experience, the actual writing and producing of the play soon held a greater attraction for the poet than the source of it. soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love. In this instance art took over life. Ironically, 'The Countess Cathleen' was first performed in Dublin on May 6th, 1891 by the Irish Literary Theatre Company with Maud Gonne playing the role of the Countess.

'On Baile's Strand' (1904) was begun soon after Maud Gonne announced her engagement to Major John Mc Bride, hero of the Boer War. The play deals with the story of Cuchulainn's unwitting killing of his own son. While the young Cuchulainn was learning his warrior trade in Scotland, he had an affair with the Scottish warrior queen, Aoife. She became pregnant and, unknown to the hero, bore him a son after his return to Ireland. Aoife's love turned to hate and she raised her son to kill her former lover. Many years later she sent the young man to Ireland to challenge Cuchulainn, now the king's champion, to single combat. The high-king of Ireland, Conchubar, had bound Cuchulainn by an oath to defend the kingdom for himself and for his children. The hero unwillingly fights the young Scot and kills him. He is then told by the Fool that he has killed his own son. Maddened by grief, Cuchulainn rushes out and begins to fight against the waves of the sea, but he is drowned. As all the people have left their houses to watch the hero's struggle, the Blind Man plans to steal the bread from their ovens with the aid of the Fool.

These two minor characters are not centrally involved in the play's action, but they do influence it. The Fool tells Cuchulainn that he has killed his own son, and the Blind Man tells the audience much of the play's pre-history. On a personal level the play reflects Yeats' reaction to Maud Gonne's betrayal of their spiritual marriage of 1898. Like Cuchulainn, the poet is alsofighting against an ungovernable sea of bitterness and despair because his warrior-queen had wrecked his emotional life. The phrase may also represent the poet's unavailing struggle against old age. But while this play, like 'The Countess Cathleen', also reflects what is going on in his own emotional life, Heart-mysteries there, Yeats soon became concerned only with the structuring of the play, with the process of giving artistic shape to an idea, with turning the reality of life into the unreality, thedream of art. Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of. The poet may be recalling here his years as manager of the Abbey Theatre (1902-1910). When he buried himself in his work in an effort to forget Maud. The lines Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory. describe a structural device in Yeats' tragedies. His plays climax with a deed which, in the doing, gives definition and meaning to the character of the hero who performs it, to his present and to his future.

In the last verse, Yeats concludes that while the masterful images, his poems and plays, took shape in his brain, in pure mind, they had their origin in his emotional life, in his heart. And he now realises that he must focus on this emotional life, however ugly and disgusting it may be, if he is to recover his inspiration. I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. The seventy-three year old poet must not, as he had done in the past, betray his heart, either by writing about emotions he had not experienced himself ('The Wanderings of Oisin') or by becoming totally absorbed in the process of structuring his poems and plays ('The Countess Cathleen', 'On Baile's Strand'). Instead he must give direct expression to his feelings, must not conceal, and so lose, his emotional self behind characters and settings from mythology and folktale. The decisive statement I must lie down emphasises this new-found determination to remain true to his heart.

Back to English Homepage | Prev | Next

The Circus Animals' Desertion

By W.B. Yeats

Education Links

Leaving Cert