Essential McLuhan 320 As a case in point, Yeats begins “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” by saying: 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 stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. This poem is a ricorso or rehearsal, a retrieval of Yeats’s entire career. Seeing himself as an old man, he has thrown himself on the scrap heap. He has archetypalized himself, but first he rehearses all the clichés of his art, all the innovations that he had introduced into the drama and poetry of his time. What can I but enumerate old themes? Having surveyed these stages of his art, his innovations and experiments, he simply says, Those masterful images because complete, Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? His answer presents the main theme of From Cliché to Archetype: the new poetic techniques and images are retrieved from 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…. Yeats brings in here the whole theme of commerce as part of the poetic process. His poetic exhibitionism onto the big top is done. The images retrieved from “the rag-and-bone-shop” out of which he built his ladder for the high-wire act are now complete and cast aside. His “Jacob’s ladder” is gone.