“The Circus Animals’ Desertion” is one of the last poems of Yeats, and is in iambic pentameter. It first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and London Mercury. Yeats refers to the stagnation of his creative faculties and the loss of sustenance of his poetic output as he contemplates over his past works. He utilizes the metaphor of the circus animals to refer to his poetic themes, characters and sources of inspiration. The circus animal is a source of amusement, and it gets deserted with the onset of age as it loses its luster and utility value.

The poet laments over his vain attempts to discover a poetic theme. Being a broken man, he can no longer hold his thoughts in coherence .He must be satisfied with the emotional coherence that he still has intact. He refers to the elements of circus:

 

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

 

The stilted boys refer to the circus boys, yet at the same time refer to the companions of the poet’s youth. The ‘burnished chariot’ alludes to the classical references in his poems. The phrase ‘lion and woman’ refers to the lion and lion–tamer. It may point to Maud Gonne whom the poet regarded as the epitome of classical beauty.…