The circus animals (symbols)
The poem's title symbols, "all on show," represent the speaker's great dreams and memories that once endowed him with inspiration and joy. The circus animals are his fantasies, his youth, his writing, and all of the great trappings that have departed since he has aged and come to know loss and heartbreak.
Myth (motif)
The whole poem is threaded through with myths; although it is really about disillusionment with romantic myths, it sure does a good job of paying tribute to a whole host of them here. In the poem, the speaker continuously refers to old fantasies—the myth of Oisin, the Fool and the Blind Man (Cuchulain), and enchanted islands: all parts of stories that are magical, fanciful, and fundamentally unreal. By referencing myth so often, the speaker shows us that part of him is still enchanted by all the myths he once believed in, though he now understands their hollowness and insubstantiality.
Stages (motif)
The speaker constantly refers to his specific love of performances, masks, and dreams, which he seems to love even more than the real people on the stage and the real stories that substantiate his dreams. He loves things because they are unreal, it seems; he falls for "players and painted stage," "not the things they were emblems of." His deep love for performances and not for real people has left him alone now that the curtain has finally closed and the lights have gone down.
The Fool and the Blind Man, Cuchulain, the Countess Cathleen, and Oisin (Allegories)
This poem is stuffed to the brim with allegories—stories used to represent larger themes or mythologies. Yeats picks specific characters out of the mythology he spent so much of his life falling in love with, deploying them here to represent specific aspects of the dreamworld he created out of poetry and fantasy.
The Fool and the Blind Man appear in Yeats' Cuchulain cycle, acting as shadows of the main characters, providing commentary on their actions. The Fool may be a reference to the tarot, in which the Fool card symbolizes a new beginning or a creation, and the Blind Man may represent death.
Cuchulain is the protagonist of Yeats' epic poem about a mythological Irish hero, one of Yeats' deep dives into grand Irish history and folklore.
The Countess Cathleen is a verse drama by Yeats, written in blank verse. It is the first play by Yeats and is often cited as the first great play of the Irish Renaissance.
Oisin, a legendary Irish warrior poet, is the main hero in "The Wanderings of Oisin," one of Yeats' earliest publications.
