"The Circus Animals' Desertion" -W.B. Yeats

This is one of the most depressing titles in poetry, and most of the poem is similarly so. It is a late poem (literally the last poem in Last Poems). In it Yeats paints a sobering portrait of an aging artist (the ring leader and Yeats himself) profoundly disenchanted with his trade. The central problem revolves around his inability to forge a work of art (the performance or, for Yeats, a poem) out of the characters and tropes at his disposal: circus animals, stilted boys, burnished chariots, "lion and woman and Lord knows what..." Yeats was always anxious about his poetic symbolism--look at the short poem "The Coat" to see how he renounces "old mythologies" and decides that "there's more enterprise / In walking naked." I think it's crucial while reading this poem to imagine Yeats himself looking back at his own oeuvre, questioning the deployment of his own constellation of characters and tropes. Read in this way, the poem is thoroughly post-modern, a poem about writing poems.

I was most impressed by the closing strophe of this poem, but I'm posting the whole thing--it's not too long, and it's necessary if one is going to fully appreciate the stunning finale.

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

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.

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.

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.

I only recently discovered that Yeats wrote that last line, even though it's quite famous. I became acquainted with it while working at Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, where it is inscribed above one of the door frames. I think Allen Ginsberg called S&Co. "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." A great image. Anyway, back to the poem...

In the first section, the ringmaster, "being but a broken man," is struggling between sticking to his trade (seeking a theme) or being "satisfied with [his] heart." The second section opens with a depressing revelation: "What can I but enumerate old things." I don't believe this means that he has run dry of creativity; rather, much more darkly, he is wondering whether he has ever produced anything truly original. After recalling the themes which have defined his career (by the way, these stanzas make direct references to Yeats's early work), a kernel of self-knowledge comes in the third stanza of the second section:

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.

The ringmaster is questioning the validity of the abstract ideals he has represented with the "players and painted stage." Having become enchanted by "the dream," his art became disconnected with reality to the degree that its relevance and potency waned. It had become hollow, a play of masks symbolizing nothing. That said, there is beauty in the representation:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A bit of back-patting on the part of Yeats (calling his poetry "masterful") before asking a question that has been asked many, many times by many, many poets. Where does poetry come from? Or, What is the source of inspiration? For Yeats, who has just described the emptiness of a poetic system committed to the abstract and ethereal, the answer is thoroughly anti-Romantic. No fountains of knowledge, no vague notions of genius, no imagination "bodying forth." What is the origin of poetry?

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.

Where are the sweeping vistas of the Lake District? Where are the existential crises of Hamlet? Where are the gods? Where is the Muse? Where are the fatefully beautiful women? Where are the warriors? Where is the impossible love? Where is the innocent child? Without them, what is the poet to do?

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.

I suppose this final retreat into the self is somewhat Romantic--but Yeats's portrait of the artist's interior is not at all. Deprived of access to the ethereal realms (the ladder is gone), he must finally be "satisfied with [his] heart"--here described as a foul rag and bone shop.

I like to think of this as a response to a goal Yeats set for himself earlier in his career in "The Fisherman." Speaking of the eponymous character, he cries,

'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'

I think "The Circus Animals' Desertion" comes pretty darn close.

"Lachrymae Christi" -Hart Crane

Making a purchase on this poem in any sort of wholesale form was impossible for me, but somehow the potency of the images lingered like a blow to the head. My readings have graduated from an apocalyptic vision of contemporary Cities of the Plain into a rumination on the general project of the Romantic artist—that is, to convert raw emotion and mystical experience into a piece cathartic verse. I’ve only started reading Crane recently, so I’m not qualified to situate this poem within his broader oeuvre. It comes from his first book of poems, White Buildings. The title is rendered in English “Tears of Christ.” Strangely, a wine I recently consumed (twice) bears the same Latinate title. It is a simple, fleshy Italian white from a vineyard located on Mount Vesuvius.


Lachrymae Christi

Whitely, while benzine
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
(Inside the sure machinery
Is still
And curdled only where a sill
Sluices its one unyielding smile)

Immaculate venom binds
The fox's teeth, and swart
Thorns freshen on the year's
First blood. From flanks unfended,
Twanged red perfidies of spring
Are trillion on the hill.

And the nights opening
Chant pyramids,--
Anoint with innocence,--recall
To music and retrieve what perjuries
Had galvanized the eyes.

While chime
Beneath and all around
Distilling clemencies,--worms'
Inaudible whistle, tunneling
Not penitence
But song, as these
Perpetual fountains, vines,--

Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.

Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

Names peeling from Thine eyes
And their undimming lattices of flame,
Spell out in palm and pain
Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.

Lean long from sable, slender boughs,
Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights
Strike from Thee perfect spheres,
Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail
Of earth again—

Thy face
From charred and riven stakes, O
Dionysus, Thy
Unmangled target smile.


The most difficult stanza, I believe, begins with “Let sphinxes from…” For me, resolving the difficult syntactic and semantic aberrations was akin to tackling a Magic-Eye crossword puzzle—to the point that I was physically turning the book on its side for new “angles.” Reading “let” as an adjective is crucial to the first sentence, which makes it synonymous with “loosed” or “released.” Leaving the “letting” agent deliberately ambiguous insinuates a divine, unearthly power descending to bestow inspiration on the poet. But it’s a damn gruesome portrait of inspiration (I can’t help but think of Isaiah and the burning coal). Compare with Wordsworth’s recollection in tranquility, or Milton’s invocation! The image “Betrayed stones slowly speak” is the lynchpin of this poem’s dramatic force—and its soft redemptive power. But before analyzing it, I want to parse out the narrative development.

The opening landscape sets the reader firmly (this firmness will erode) in the industrial/post-industrial age, with an alliterative serpent (sill / [that] Sluices its one unyielding smile) moving in sibilants through a scene of caustic, stagnant waste. The first sentence finishes, on the other side of the parentheses in the next strophe, in which chemical imagery gives way to a more violent, dynamic, organic destruction. Insidious sibilants give way to a more forceful, but somehow unsatisfying, set of fricatives. The lamb (flanks unfended), of course, is Christ, and the red of his blood contrasts with the “whitely” benzine. This “white” is a symbol of spiritual purity; but it also represents a sterile, cold, chemical blankness, which contrasts with the red passion of a human body. The life force of this blood is such that it “twangs” (literally plucks a string) a trillion perfidies on Golgotha (note the temporal shift)—a song that will continue to reverberate in the next two strophes, and rise to celestial prominence in the closing lines.

“Thy Nazerene and tinder eyes” marks the major turn in the poem. The first half has laid the groundwork for Christ’s fiery death and ultimate resurrection in the form of Dionysus. (Before diving in, I just want to point out, if it’s not already obvious, that I’m treating Christ/Dionysus as a poet-figure, and visa-versa.) The second half images a sort of profane illumination rooted in the surging passion of Dionysus and a purgatorial vision of poetic inspiration.

Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

The image here is beyond elliptical: sphinxes from the ripe borage of death? I’m not going to attempt a word-by-word reading. I see this as a loosing of the Word from its connection with the physical body of Christ (“The Word was God”)—a splitting of the logos, which grants a vigorous, physical strength to poetic language outside of religious constrictions. The “sentient cloud” (the closest thing to God we have in this poem) descends into the earth, infusing the inert landscape with creative agency: betrayed stones slowly speak. First, note the alliteration and the four consecutive hard stresses. It’s good poetry. The reference here is to the verse from the Gospels, which claims that if no one praises God, the very stones will cry out (Luke 19:40). By dying, Christ has betrayed the faithful (remember the trillion perfidies). But in this very betrayal, a new song is rising from the earth itself—one not bound to traditional notions of spirituality. It’s important that the stones begin murmuring within seconds of Christ’s death, and not three days later by an empty tomb.

Crane denies a traditional resurrection. Instead, he locates the redemptive power of Christ in his very mortality. There is no spiritual rebirth, no heaven, no immortality in Crane’s retelling. This is not a cause for despair; rather, it is an affirmation of the physical world as a site of sacred illumination. Further down, the song of the spheres “[lifts] up in lilac-emerald breath the grail / Of earth again,” once again bringing low the celestial realm. Or is it, perhaps, a raising of the mundane?

The poem concludes with Christ, now Dionysus, smiling—a not so subtle response to the diabolical smile in the first stanza. The poet figure has come out victorious, despite having been crucified (and not yet removed from the cross). How? I read it as a thoroughly Romantic victory affirming Shelley’s quasi-religious belief in the the legislative power of poetry. Victory has come through the killing-off of systematic religion and escapist fables. Stripped bare of tradition, Christ's Promethean death unleashes the Word.