Old Age and Art in Yeats

Abstract

This article discusses a consistent blend of autobiographical retrospection, metaphysical speculations, the passion of an old man raging against the approaching night. Many of these are similar to those in his earlier works, but art cannot be enlivened until it is kept in touch with “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” as in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.”In “High Talk,” Yeats resorts to the determination of the artist in a degenerate world. Using a circus metaphor, he demands the artist put on high stilts so he may catch the eye of the audience. He needs the stilts, now being incapable of the brilliant fantasy of past youth. The poet is Malachi Stilt-Jack, the maker of metaphors in art, but the walker upon stilts, though an eye-catching figure, is an absurd posturing creature in his “timber-toes.” The image of “its rag and bone” in “An Acre of Grass” is connected to the image of “old bones, old rags” in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” It is a recurrent theme of old age in Last Poems. Much of what has been noble and great is gone; what remains is raging of the flesh. Only memories of the past remain to the old man, physically exhausted. “An Acre of Grass” looks back on the major poetic themes in Yeats’s later life.