This poem was learned at university when I was a student -- not fully memorized, but what I remember, I remember well. I'll only quote pieces of it. Old man Yeats was autobiographical here, and much of what he wrote applies only to him; but what hits home for me, does hit hard.

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer until old age came
My circus animals were all on show....

Players and painted stage took all my love   
And not those things that they were emblems of.

These masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse, the sweepings of the street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

-- from The Circus Animals' Desertion, W. B. Yeats
copyright renewed by Georgie Yeats in 1961;
when reprinted, done by permission of Michael Yeats