Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
William Butler Yeats' "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" is the sixth of twenty-one Crazy Jane poems published in Words for Music Perhaps. The sequence deals with the lost love of an eccentric older woman. The first seven poems in the sequence deal especially with the relationship between body and spirit and Crazy Jane's opinions are shown through dramatic arguments with the local Bishop, who spurs her on with his attempts to bring her to God. The Bishop feels that the soul is the only human aspect worth tending to while Crazy Jane strongly feels that to experience life or love, a unity of being is necessary encompassing the physical and spiritual as well as joy and pain. "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" is central to the purpose of the sequence in that it provides us with Crazy Jane's opinion that "Fair and foul are near of kin, / And fair needs foul." This statement relates to almost everything else spoken of in the poem: the foul resting place of fair deceased lovers, the foul "bodily lowliness" and "heart's pride" involved in sexual love, and the joy and heartbreak of finding true love (Ellmann, 278). This theme of fair and foul is also present in "Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers." The refrain, of "Love is like
The Crazy Jane poems also show Yeats' ideals regarding true love. Her love for Jack the Journeyman never disappears or even fades despite the fact that her body has become "like a road / that men pass over". She knows that Jack's ghost will wander the earth as is told in "Crazy Jane and the Bishop" and tells us in "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman" that "Mine must walk when dead" as well. This idea of the wandering spirit comes from Yeats' "A Vision" where it is explained that love seals two souls together so that they can never enter the kingdom of God, and instead must walk the earth after death, searching for their soul mate (Unterecker, 228). The second purpose Yeats had in using Crazy Jane seems to be a mechanism for escape. He was almost seventy years old when he was writing these poems and may have felt that openly sexual poems would not have been appropriate. Putting these words into the mouth of a "crazy" woman may have seemed to be more acceptable. Yeats also wrote in letters to both Olivia Shakespear and his wife that he enjoyed writing the Crazy Jane poems, although she became an obsession of his, and eventually he felt he had to stop writing about her (Garab, 24). However, he also felt that the poems in Words for Music Perhaps were passionate and truthful: " ' Sexual abst
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Approximate Word count = 875
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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