The Disintegrating Art of the Ring-master

Abstract

The decaying of the artistic and imaginative faculties with age and simultaneous soul-searching introspection has been one of the favorite’s subjects with the romantics as well as poets who expressed the personal in their poetry. One of 'the last romantics', W.B.Yeats deals with such a theme in "The Circus Animal's Desertion". In this poem, W.B .Yeats analyses his poetic career with devastating honesty. Failure in love, dissolution in the old age, Irish national concerns etc produced in Yeats a schism that led , according to the poet , the erosion of the creative imagination . As a result Yeats was not able to handle his images in the way he had been accustomed to deal with in his earlier days of poetic career. This loss of control over his images and symbols and decapitating poetic imagination caused a grievous wound in his mind. But the result is not altogether tragic. Loss of poetic sensibility is compensated by enlarged vision, wisdom and the strength of the mind. He realizes that art takes its root in the 'fury and more of human veins'.