Last of the Romantics
I’ve danced around a theme for a while, so I might as well dive right in. Yeats made many mistakes, particularly in the realm of belief. But the hungry heart behind it is a spirit that I can understand. I thought I might take a second to celebrate and interpolate, in my opinion, his finest poem. Though A Vision is the culmination of his life’s work, it is his reflection, written near the end of his life that just rings in my heart. I have never been able to free myself of this poem.
The Circus Animals’ DesertionI
I SOUGHT a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
I think of my efforts on this web site in many ways as my own peculiar circus, a mélange of ideas and images gathered over the course of too many years. Too many late nights. Too much loneliness. The last time I met someone new (outside of school) she looked at me, after having read my writing on this site, and declared: “You’re not how I pictured you. You have such sad eyes.”
But, “being but a broken man, / I must be satisfied with my heart.” That is just the way things are. I’ve carried it with me beating, counting off the moments of time spent searching. I moved so quickly for so many years. And then, abruptly, time began to slow and then stop.
II
What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
There is at heart always a romantic quest not to be alone. But opposing forces, deception and hatred and lies do drive us to make sense of it all. The themes are old, but the understanding of them is wanting. That’s what Yeats thought his gift must be. At first it was the realm of pure symbol, the ultimate in polyvalent signifers. Then it was the system, dictated by spirits to his wife which became A Vision. But here we find the admission that he ended up the fool, the bit of straw in the wind, who lost the knowledge of just what was behind the dream.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
There is a Blake illustration that I know Yeats had in mind when constructing this final, arresting image. It’s of a man holding a ladder up to the moon. The caption reads: “I Want! I Want!”
The creative mind places the rungs on the ladder as it tries to reach out for more. It starts from nothing, and builds a ladder to the stars. But in the end, our skills fade away and we end up back in the dust. Bits of cloth and bone, that’s all we are in the end. And only the desire of the heart can drive us, with all its attendant despair.
I don’t think this poem is sad, myself, just true. Eventually, we all just crumble and fade. But it is such a beautiful dream, while it lasts. I have not given up on the dream of life yet.
