Our of the four poems for this weeks class, "The Circus Animals' Desertion" is my favorite. In it being one of Yeats final poems before his death, the poem gives off a sense of melancoly. I feel bad for Yeats for not being able to find what used to come so easy to him. In "Circus," Yeats is searching for more poetic themes to write but cannot find any. He has been doing so for "six weeks or so" (Line 2) but since he hasn't, he is now a "broken man" (Line 3). The first stanza seems of being Yeats way of telling his readers of his ailing health. He is old and no longer, it seems, to produce any more imagery into his poems, which are like "circus animals."
Beginning in the second stanza, Yeats looks back on his previous elaborate works, citing three: "The Wandering of Oisin", "The Countess Cathleen" and "On Baile's Strand". He tells of how they were great and "showy" - definitely holding a poetic theme and being filled with beauty. My favorite line of this poem is "Players and painted stage took all my love" (31). It's Yeats expressing that he always loved the imagery of the stage and how he loved to put the "show" into his poems.
At the end of this poem, Yeats says that all of his works, which "grew in pure mind" but it all started out common and bland. He wants to go to a place where he can "lie down where all the ladders start/in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart" (39-40). I take this as Yeats wanting to go back to a place where poetry and imagery start so he can revitalize his elaborate work - to be like "circus animals" again.
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