A Time of Lost Hope

I found it interesting how the presentations from our classmates on Monday were so related to the ideas presented in Yeats’ The Circus Animals’ Desertion. I remember the groups talking about how this time in literature was a very dark and pessimist time. It wasn’t dark in the sense that it was gothic and gloomy, but in the sense that all hope and light seemed to have been abandoned. It seemed as if many authors had lost their trust in the beauty of nature and humanity, and that directly affect their writing styles. This is clearly seen in Yeats’ poem. He writes about how he has completely lost poetic themes that once seemed to come so easily to him. Majority of the poem is spent with him reminiscing about his past poetic themes that were so purely complete. However, he quickly snaps out about the daydream of the past and comes to terms with the unfortunate present; he “must lie down where all the ladders start,/In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”.