Summary
"The Circus Animals' Desertion" finds its speaker searching desperately for a theme: perhaps an idea, inspiration, or central meaning that will allow him to understand all that has happened to him in his life and that will inspire him to write. But he fails to find it. He thinks back to times long ago when he was full of ideas and energy, when his "circus animals were all on show." He remembers what some of these "circus animals," or old ideas and romances and inspirations, looked like, and he tries to return to them. He remembers how enchanted he was by the mythological characters and fantastic, romantic dreams he once had. Specifically, he remembers a character named "Countess Cathleen," and thinks through some other myths he used to write about.
Upon a deeper reflection, he then realizes that perhaps it was the dream itself, or the act of dreaming, that drew him in and made him fall in love with these characters.
The end of the poem finds the speaker emerging out of his memories to observe the present moment, which is desolate: a street littered with trash, a "foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
Analysis
The first section of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" finds the speaker experiencing some sort of writers' block or existential crisis—or perhaps both. It finds him seeking a theme, an idea or core of meaning, every day for six weeks. The fact that he has been seeking this theme so determinedly for so long reveals that he is diligently searching, determined to find something, which makes the fact that he cannot find it all the more frustrating and existentially threatening.
He realizes that he is a "broken man," a phrase that might imply that he feels lost, old, or otherwise compromised, damaged by the ravages of time or by emotional or physical turmoil that has left him fractured. All he has left is his heart (an idea that will return at the end of the poem, so stay tuned).
He remembers that in the past, throughout all the seasons until he grew old, his "circus animals were all on show." These circus animals, the "stilted boys" (or the stilt-walkers), the "burnished chariot," and the lions, performing women, and other oddities and fantastic, colorful characters that characterize the carnivalesque—these were his faithful companions during ages of old, when he was full of energy and life and dreams. They symbolize the thrill of dreams and inspiration, youth and fantasy. The poem's next stanza finds Yeats taking a deep dive into this carnival of youth and adventure and romantic inspiration.
First, the speaker remembers Oisin, the subject of Yeats' first publication outside of a magazine. Oisin was a hero of Irish mythology, and Yeats' book The Wanderings of Oisin described the adventures of this hero, as he made his way through the mystical land of Faerie. This land is often found in old medieval texts, and is typical of romantic idealism. The ladies are always chaste, and there are always clear heroes and clear villains, and there are usually great, grand battle sequences and romances.
The speaker references "three enchanted isles," which are "vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose"—all landscapes he traversed through his writing and his imagination while living in the world of these grand myths. Interestingly, he calls these "themes of the embittered heart." The poem, therefore, is not simply idealizing the past. It admits that there was always some bitterness, and some hunger, in the human condition, even in the old songs and courtly shows of the romantic past. But in this past, perhaps, stories and myths were used to cover or cloak the fear and emptiness that haunts life, and for a while, they worked.
The speaker admits that he truly always desired the fairy bride, the ultimate conquest in ancient medieval myths. He finds this fairy bride, in a sense, in "The Countess Cathleen," likely a stand-in for Maud Gonne, Yeats' longtime unrequited love. The Countess, like Maud, "gave her soul away" because of "pity" (both these woman, the fictional and the real one, were revolutionaries—Gonne was an Irish nationalist). Something about these women's willingness to relinquish their souls for their causes inspires and infatuates the speaker, who is perhaps seeking his own infatuation, meaning, or theme to focus his life on.
The speaker at last returns to his reality at the end of the poem, seeing it as it truly is. The sets come down, the lights go off, and he sees the theatre for what it is: a theatre, a vehicle for performance. He sees that the people and themes he loved so much were always just stories: circus animals, playing out onstage, enchanting and luminous and unreal. And perhaps he loved them because they were unreal, because they were detached from him and so could not be distorted by the truth of the real, so they could not be unmasked by the light of day and shown for all their flaws and humanness.
The last part of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" deviates sharply away from the mythologies that the rest of the poem delved into. No longer are we traversing enchanted isles and painted stages. The truth, Yeats seems to be implying, is that all of these mythologies began on empty streets, in the lonely chambers of the heart's secret longings. He built them up into glory, but at their core, there is nothing but the "sweepings of the street," nothing but the blankness of a page, the slate of a life into which we are born, upon which we project stories and myths.
There is nothing but "the raving slut who keeps the till," a harsh and brutal depiction of a suffering madwoman who does nothing but work. So different from the Countess Cathleen or the fairy bride, this character seems to have no real purpose; she gives her body away meaninglessly, randomly; she rants and raves at nothing.
His "ladder" is gone—a ladder that led him up into the starry realm of dreams and the circus and the theatre and magic—and now it is time, he says, to lie down "where all ladders begin," where all stories ultimately come from—in "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." This last is one of poetry's most powerful and striking phrases, one that shines a harsh and somewhat nihilistic light on the human condition. This foul rag and bone shop may represent the human experience without any flourishes, ideologies, or masks. A rag and bone shop, during Yeats' time, was a shop containing used junk that most people wouldn't find any use for. Yeats is perhaps implying that all stories start here—from messy themes that are reused over and over again, that can be spun into beautiful meaningful stories but ultimately decay. His descriptions of the detritus of the streets certainly seem to represent a chaotic, meaningless sense of lostness.
On the other hand, perhaps the ending is not that nihilistic. Perhaps this rag and bone shop is what inspires people to write and love and hope and romanticize. Perhaps it provides the tools and the imperative to write or love one's way out of meaninglessness, into the circus of dreams—if only for a little while.
