<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537191" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Circus Animals' Desertion</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,<br>I sought it daily for six weeks or so.<br>Maybe at last, being but a broken man,<br>I must be satisfied with my heart, although<br>Winter and summer till old age began<br>My circus animals were all on show,<br>Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,<br>Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What can I but enumerate old themes?<br>First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose<br>Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,<br>Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,<br>Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,<br>That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;<br>But what cared I that set him on to ride,<br>I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then a counter-truth filled out its play,<br>'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;<br>She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,<br>But masterful Heaven had intetvened to save it.<br>I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,<br>So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,<br>And this brought forth a dream and soon enough<br>This dream itself had all my thought and love.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread<br>Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;<br>Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said<br>It was the dream itself enchanted me:<br>Character isolated by a deed<br>To engross the present and dominate memory.<br>players and painted stage took all my love,<br>And not those things that they were emblems of.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> III</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Those masterful images because complete<br>Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?<br>A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,<br>Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,<br>Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut<br>Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,<br>I must lie down where all the ladders start<br>In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=William+Butler+Yeats">William Butler Yeats</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537191" data-title="The Circus Animals' Desertion de William Butler Yeats" data-description="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..."></div> </div> </div>

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