Disillusionment
Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion" is about disillusion: the way ideals, dreams, and fantasies have broken down for the speaker as he has grown older, leaving him with nothing but himself.
Having lived—as poet, dreamer, and believer in various causes—in the sparkling world of illusions for much of his life, the speaker is realizing that those illusions were hollow and unreal. He is coming to understand and accept that he used to have delusions of grandeur, but those have departed, and there is no cohesive theme or singular great narrative underwriting his life. Instead, there are only the pieces, which form the poem.
Performance
"The Circus Animals' Desertion" centers around performance: circus performances, performances of rage and hate, performances of being. Lines like "my circus animals were all on show" and references to fanciful images and heroic characters like Oisin and "players and painted stage all took my love" all refer to various theatrical performances. The speaker seems to say he has been living in a performative state for most of his life, embodying and describing characters that are not truly real. The world before was a carnival, a festival, but by the end, the stage has been cleared, the actors have gone home, and there is only a "foul rag and bone shop" of the heart left behind.
Dreams and Illusions
In this poem, the speaker laments the loss of illusions and dreams. The quote "and this brought forth a dream and soon enough/the dream itself had all my love" finds the speaker realizing that what he had once loved and worshiped was in truth a dream, a falsehood destroyed by time's ravages. What appeared to be beautiful and grand turns out only to have been a projection, made of nothing but old, recycled ideas.
Old Age
At the end of the poem, Yeats uses the word "old" many times in a row, and the whole poem seems to be a reflective expression of nostalgia and memory. The poet is reflecting on the passage of time, and realizing that he has only been using the same old themes over and over in different ways; there are no new territories for him to write about, and so he has lost his ability to create new things.
Meta-commentary
"The Circus Animals' Desertion" is "meta" because it is a poem that comments on itself, expressing its speaker's own lack of faith in his previous work and his ability to create new work.
This makes it somewhat ironic, because in writing about how he cannot write, the speaker is still managing to write, still managing to create something original and vibrant. These swirling layers of contradictory commentary make the poem more difficult to analyze; it is not simply a poem about aging and loss, it is also about what happens when aging and loss and disillusionment become poetic subjects, making it an early work in the canon of postmodernism, which often comments on language's failure to communicate real singular meanings.
