The Circus Animals' Desertion Literary Elements

The speaker in "The Circus Animals' Desertion" is an older person looking back on his life, reflecting on all of his accomplishments. Most likely a stand-in for Yeats himself, the speaker expresses a longing for the old days of hope and inspiration, but also disillusionment with the myths that constituted this inspiration, and he finds himself having to face a new reality.

Iambic pentameter

The poem's title itself contains a metaphor: the circus animals are used to symbolize all of the speaker's old, flashy, glamorous dreams and ideals, and their desertion represents his lack of new fresh ideas and his loss of faith in his old creations.
Other metaphors include the "players and painted stage" that also represent what the circus animals represent—fantasy and myth, visions of grand unrequited love for illusions, not actual people—and ironically, even the poem's final scene at the rag and bone shop is a metaphor for reality and disillusionment; even when he tries to describe reality, Yeats seems unable to actually speak in anything but heavily-symbolic imagery.

The poem's first few lines contain alliteration—"sought" is repeated three times, followed by "six" and "so," creating a lilting, poetic sensation that draws the reader into its rhythm. This is echoed by the repetition of "old" in the poem's third stanza—"old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, old iron, old bones, old rags," which also adds to the poem's internal rhythm, which pounds like a heartbeat and makes it feel alive and urgent.

The poem's greatest example of irony is that it is about a writer who cannot come up with new ideas—and yet the poem itself is an example of a great new idea that the author has come up with. And although he spends the whole time lamenting the falsity of the metaphorical, grand mythologies he has spent his life writing about, he does create another metaphorical space at the end, albeit a less glamorous one—the "rag and bone shop of the heart."

The poem does not have a protagonist, other than the speaker, who is a somewhat ambiguous character; the poem's main antagonist is time

The poem's primary conflict is the speaker's internal struggle to find new inspiration, and to find fresh meaning in his life's work. He laments his inability to come up with new ideas, and then even begins to question the legitimacy of his old ideas, which he understands were really just dreams and myths, not based in a substantial reality.

The poem is decidedly anticlimactic in that it builds up to a realization that "It was the dream itself [that] enchanted" the speaker and that he was really in love with illusions, not real people and things. The end of the poem finds the speaker not reaching some fantastic new height or dramatic end but rather settling down back to the unglamorous world of reality.

The poem begins where it ends: with brokenness and resignation. The speaker states that he "must be satisfied with [his] heart" and at the end he must descend to the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart," making the poem cyclical—sort of in the way that lifetimes are cyclical, venturing out only to return to the darkness from whence they came.

The poem is entirely stuffed with allusions, from early references to Oisin—the Irish hero who was the subject of some of Yeats' early works—to the references to the Countess Cathleen, a play Yeats wrote that starred his lifelong love, Maud Gonne.

The "circus animals" are an example of a synecdoche, in which a part refers to the whole, for the circus animals refer to the whole circus, and ultimately to the whole scope of myth and poetry.