Directors in Their Magic Hour

IT is a truism that artists in their last years confront the waning of their powers and undertake the work of valediction. Prospero, drowning his book of spells at the end of “The Tempest,” is understood to be a stand-in for Shakespeare, whose own magic ceases with the close of his final play. More generally Shakespeare’s old magician is taken as an emblem of geriatric creative surrender, declaring with bittersweet graciousness that he is finished and leaving the stage to the next generation.

“The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” posthumously published in William Butler Yeats’s “Last Poems,” spells out a similar theme of artistic senescence. The aging poet, looking around for inspiration, finds that the magic he commanded in his younger days has fled:
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