Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” belongs with Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s late poems about vitality, aging, death, and the persistence of the creative impulse. Published as part of Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems in 1932, collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems, the full Crazy Jane sequence and other poems in this collection address Irish history and folk culture. Yeats weaves together English and Irish traditions, pagan and Christian beliefs, male and female versions of power, and ideas about the boundary between life and death, all while challenging conventional thought in each of these contexts. These poems subvert expectations in theme, but Yeats chooses traditional verse forms for basic structure, often using dazzling combinations of internal rhyme and alliterative runs, as if to create a linguistic version of the interlocking patterns prevalent in Celtic art.

The penultimate poem in the Crazy Jane sequence, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” unites themes from the preceding poems and brings Jane closer to her full power. She faces the Bishop, her complement and antithesis, speaking for the parts of history, myth, and culture often left out of the dominate narrative. But as Yeats asserts through Jane, ignoring the deepest forces of nature never subdues those powers for long. The wry, clever exchange between two oppositional and in some ways complementary characters allows Yeats to portray the complex Irish psyche.

Poet Biography

Born in England in 1865, William Butler Yeats lived the latter part of his life among the elite Anglo-Irish Protestant population ruling Ireland in the early 20th century. There he found himself drawn to the culture, language, politics, and mentality of the servant class, the remaining Gaelic people who made up the majority of the population, but who were legally forbidden from holding positions of power or even speaking their native language in public. Yeats's advocacy and social position helped foster a new era of Irish literature, bringing a new focus to Irish mythology, folklore, and language. Alongside dramatist Lady Gregory, Yeats founded several presses and the Abbey Theater. Politically, Yeats supported Irish nationalism; he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood as a young man, and later served as an appointed Senator for the Irish Free State after the war of independence.

Yeats reacted to the mechanized world of his day by harking back to an imagined golden age of mystery and imagination. In accord with his interest in Irish mythology and folk culture, Yeats embraced spiritualism and the occult: Swedenborgian philosophy, seances, and experiments in automatic writing influenced his life and his writing. For Yeats, inspiration moved through human lives and minds, lasting as a force beyond the bounds of mortality and time. His beliefs thus shared concepts with early 19th century Romanticism while embracing Irish tough-mindedness, connection to the land, and acceptance of violence and chaos as a natural part of life.

Yeats’s lifespan saw the shift from Victorian to modern sensibility. His poetic work avoids the experiments with form many of his contemporaries conducted; however, his modern themes and attitudes often stand in stark contrast to the traditional forms he uses, creating a dramatic effect.

Yeats’s identification with the Irish, despite his English origins and upbringing in London, extended beyond politics. For many years, he pursued a relationship with Irish nationalist Maud Gonne. The relationship existed only on his side, however; even after her husband’s death, Gonne turned down Yeats’s proposals. For a time, his attentions turned to Gonne’s daughter Iseult, but the Gonne women eventually served Yeats as muses rather than companions. At 51, Yeats married the 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Leeds, a free-spirited heiress. His proposal to Hyde-Leeds came only weeks after Iseult Gonne’s last refusal, but Hyde-Leeds soon won Yeats’s full attention by demonstrating a talent for contacting spirits through automatic writing.

Yeats’s later years included a political role in the Irish Free State along with continued literary experimentation, with drama, poetry, prose, and translation. Yeats won the Nobel Prize in 1923, becoming the first Nobel winner from a free Ireland. He died in France in 1939.

Poem Text

Yeats, William Butler. “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.“ 1932. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Crazy Jane’s conversation with a Bishop on the road provides the narrative for this episode in Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poem sequence. In a first person account, Jane starts her story with the moment she encounters the Bishop. Although she reports that there was “much said” (Line 2) between the two of them, their exchange turns out to be compact. The Bishop addresses Jane first, describing her withered appearance and issuing an invitation to consider the state of her soul. The Bishop wants Jane to feel a sense of urgency to change her ways and find a “heavenly” home (Line 5), but Jane responds with characteristic tartness and verve. Her banter with the Bishop shows her agility with language, her sophistication, and her earthy candor.

Jane takes issue with the Bishop’s premise: the division of heavenly heights and low, earthbound locations. Jane rejects the Bishop's focus on the ethereal, and his disdain for the body. Instead, she counters his discussion with references to the things he elides: the location of her dead friends, who are in the "grave" (Line 10), and the fact that while the Bishop believes the human body is "some foul sty" (Line 6), its most physiologically dirty places are also the seat of physical love and reproduction ("Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement" (Lines 15-16). Jane’s cosmology offers an interdependence between high and low places, mediated by love. For Jane, bodily truths can be as revelatory as philosophical or religious ones. By the end of the poem, the reader knows Yeats’s “crazy” epithet for her carries a good bit of irony.