"The Circus Animals' Desertion IV"This is the last in my series of pictures depicting Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion." This photo illustrates the last lines:
I must lie down where all ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
I chose to depict a death-in-life scene, showing the broken refuse of human dreams next to signs of new life. The poor chariot has flat tires, the circus animals are ghost-like, and the snakes devour the eggs, but many eggs do continue, and those hatch new birds. Snakes in my pictures are never bad: they are symbols of regeneration.
Yeats says that his "masterful" images of the past "grew in pure mind" but they began 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...
Our best work comes not from glorious themes but from that which the mind has discarded as unimportant. That is where the imagination resides, in the heart where broken images are waiting for us to make them into new art.
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2 comments:
Ta da! Absolutely marvelous.
Would you consider making this series into lithographs?
Gretchen
That is where the imagination resides, in the heart where broken images are waiting for us to make them into new art. ....
I`m so impressed with the bursting you seem to be feeling. What energy.!
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