Yeats' later poems

"The Circus Animals' Desertion" left a deep impression on me, both in light of Yeats' struggle with poetic meaning (as outlined in Blackmur's essay) and personally as writer who seeks the inexpressible.

Yeats begins by poking fun - in a somewhat sorrowful way - at his earlier work. This self-criticism emerges out of a frustration with writing. "My circus animals were all on show." Yeats sees a triviality in his youthful poetry. A flamboyant circus is a far cry from what Yeats clearly wants to embody in his work. The profundity he seeks is shadowed by empty entertainment. The performance is shallow, yet personal in a humiliating way. "What can I do but enumerate old themes?" he cries. His audience demands what they are familiar with. He is chained to the mundane

Yeats is unclear about whether it is the essence of his older poems that has become trivial or whether it is their popular interpretation. He seems to strongly disassociate the latter with his ambitions as well as his passions. In the second stanza he seems to condemn one of his themes to uselessness: "Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose." While this line technically lists the richness of irony in Oisin's story, the repetition of "vain" implies a deeper disillusionment in the heart of the author. "I starved for the bosom of his faery bride." Yeats could be illuminating the deeper profundity that he is looking for, but the line emphasizes his position on the periphery; as well as the shallow lustfulness of his obsessions.

One of the most powerful lines in this poem echoes this ambiguity. "Players and painted stage took all my love,/And not those things that they were emblems of." All at once Yeats wants his art to stand on its own in its richness but still sees futility in that ambition. Without meaning, these symbols take on an air of superficiality: they are fake sets, actors. In his age, Yeats sees his aesthetic crumbling without the support of firm meaning. The images literally become trash on the street. But Yeats clings to this refuse when he resolves to return to the core of his soul for inspiration. The ladders start in "The foul rag and bone shop of the heart." The profundity exists in the trivial, and the poet must found his ambitions in the peripheral and the mundane.