we each have our own circus animals

I think it was a windy, overcast day, though honestly, I don’t really remember; I think it just makes sense that the day would have been cold. I was standing in Sir Walter Scott’s home- Abbotsford, said to be his greatest work of art- when I received a small, simply worded text message that sort of paused my world for a second.  

I remember being encircled by all the grandeur- all the showiness and flair and prized possessions of a man surrounded by his own stories- when I realized that sometimes in life we get so focused on what we want to be or where we want to go or how we want our lives to look that we lose the real meaning behind it all.

There’s a poem by Yeats which begins with the line “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,”. It’s maybe one of his lesser-known poems, but holds a place as one of my personal favorites. When Yeats wrote this poem, he had reached nearly the end of his career; he had been writing poetry for years, and this piece was his own personal reflection back on his poems and quite literally his life’s work. It’s titled “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and focuses on an individual looking back on their life and what they have accomplished. The speaker goes on to describe his past pieces and what they seemed to be about- yet when he really reflected back, he realized that the works he had been putting out were like parading circus animals on show; on the surface, each seems exciting and interesting and important, but after the illusions have left there is little real substance beyond the mundane. The speaker is left with flowery language and showy script meant to be grand, illusionary masterpieces, but which have instead become

“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.”

Those “masterful images” which were “[grown] in pure mind” became merely “players and painted stage”.

                When I was standing in Abbotsford, that’s the feeling I got; I was standing in the house of a man who owned countless antiquities and priceless artifacts and surrounded himself with his stories, and I started to realize that maybe that’s the way that my life was shaping up to be- that is, filled with so many things but perhaps completely devoid of real purpose, just as in Yeats’s poem. Sir Walter Scott built up this home for himself, designed as a fake castle and filled with relics; Yeats wrote poetry full of vanities with incorrect motivations which became gaudy; I have my past actions and words and achievements, all fraught with illusion. We each have our own circus animals.

                While the exact message that I got in Sir Walter Scott’s house wasn’t important, the realization that it gave me was. For a while I had been struggling with my life’s trajectory and some of the decisions I felt that I needed to make, but I realized that so many of the things I was worrying over or stressed about were unimportant, showy, gaudy. When Yeats’s speaker decides that he must “must lie down where all the ladders start”, there is some hesitancy but also a feeling of submission and understanding. Just as this speaker found out that he must begin to pursue his writing in a way that was more truthful and full of real meaning, I got the same feeling about my own life. “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,”. There are too many important things in this world to be pursuing pointless ones, and there are too many real and genuine feelings and emotions in life to be creating elaborate and showy “circus animals”.

                 

So, on that possibly-chilly day at Abbotsford, I slipped my phone quietly into my pocket. I took one last look at Scott’s gardens and statues and suits of armor- his circus animals- and resolved to figure out the truth that I really wanted my life to reflect.