A Farewell to the Revival and the Beginnings of Irish Modernism

Abstract

In ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1939), Yeats bids farewell to the Irish Revival. The ‘masterful images’1 of his poetry and drama — Oisin, Countess Cathleen and Cuchúlain — are mocked in the poem’s title. They have deserted the poet whose mind begot them; now, one imagines, they are wandering the streets of modern Dublin as clumsy and helpless as exotic lions and elephants that have been trained to perform outmoded tricks. The poet confesses that his flight into the realm of fancy has ended. He has emerged from the state in which ‘the dream itself had all my thought and love’,2 a state in which the only reality was that of the fantastic forms of his imagination to return to the wasteland that he now recognises as his homeland, the place where the masterful images of his mind had come to life out of 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.3 KeywordsIrish TheatreMasterful ImageInvisible CloakFolk TaleCasting LadleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.