The Circus Animals’ Desertion: critical analysis

Yeats always believed that approaching death is foremost an invitation to self-

summary and self-declaration, and his later poetry seeks concertedly for an epitaph that
would express what he had been. “The Tower” arrived many years too early; “Under Ben
Bulben” somewhat rambles and blusters, though it comes to a magnificent close; “Politics,”
which ends the collected poems, is charmingly humane but slight. Of the many poems that
have the air of self-commemoration, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” seems most
satisfactory and complete as a final statement. Oisin, Cathleen, and Cuchulain may have
been masks, but even in the game of masks Yeats rehearsed the return to the place “where
all the ladders start.” Oisin’s decision to return to Ireland after three centuries among the
fairy isles was precisely such a return.
The first section of the poem, like the opening passages of “The Tower” and “Sailing
to Byzantium,” finds Yeats nursing the wound of age. He attempts to muster his “circus
animals”—the spectacle of his many masks—but he can no longer command his accustomed
resources and must be satisfied with the last resort that is the heart.
“What can I but enumerate old themes?” Yeats asks at the start of the second
section. The implication is that Yeats can do no better than recycle the themes of his early
career. He possibly alludes to his ongoing work on the play The Death of Cuchulain, which he
finished in his last weeks of life, ending a cycle of six plays on the legendary hero that he
had begun in 1901. Alternately, taking “old” to mean ancient or traditional rather than
familiar or accustomed, the question implies that he can do no better than recycle the kind
of folk themes that Oisin, Cathleen, and Cuchulain represent. On either reading, the
question suggests that Yeats has become trapped in the habits of his own imagination,
which themselves began in the insincere impulses of his youth. As “The Circus Animals’
Desertion” has it, The Wanderings of Oisin, begun in October 1886, was an elaborate
pretense animated by the romantic or sexual longing of his young manhood. The three
islands of the boyhood poem were “vain” as symbols of an unrealizable desire for the
infinite, as Yeats explained in an 1889 letter to Katharine Tynan: “There are three
incompatable things which man is always seeking—infinite feeling, infinite battle, infinite
repose—hence the three islands”
The Countess Cathleen, begun in February 1889, was Yeats’s first mature play. It
represents a “counter-truth” to The Wanderings of Oisin, as it renounces rather than
embraces the world. As Harold Bloom puts it, “the poem chooses what Yeats will later call
Self over Soul, Oisin over Patrick, while the play chooses the countess over her poet-lover,
responsibility over the dream, Soul or character over Self or personality”. And yet the play
was likewise a pretense: a projection of Yeats’s romantic anxieties and a rationalization of
his romantic frustration. Begun soon after Yeats and Maud Gonne met in January 1889, the
play softens and sanctifies Gonne’s self-sacrificial intensity, and this “dream”—the vision of
the play—became a refuge from the more difficult and complicated reality of Gonne’s
personality. The section’s third stanza refers to On Baile’s Strand, the first of Yeats’s
plays on the subject of Cuchulain. The tale of Cuchulain, the Fool, and the Blind Man
contained “Heart-mysteries” enough—difficult realities—but Yeats was again enchanted by
the “dream” of the play: its vision of heroic intensity in which he could escape his own futile
longings and the complexity of his own experience.
Oisin, Cathleen, and Cuchulain began in the heart, but tricked up its raw elements.
These elements find their legitimate metaphor not in the frippery of the circus, but in the
rough and elemental reality of urban refuse: kettle, bottle, can, iron, bone, rag and the
raving prostitute. His imagination failing in the end—departing the body almost as the soul
does—Yeats can only “lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop
of the heart.” Bloom is incisive: “In ‘Vacillation’ Yeats allows the heart the poetic honour of
taking up the Self’s struggle against the soul, of making the claim for personality against
character. ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ is something of a palinode in relation to
‘Vacillation,’ in that Yeats chooses the heart again, but without affection or respect for it.”