Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

William Butler Yeats

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1932

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Authority and Identity

The exchange between Crazy Jane and the Bishop juxtaposes tribal wisdom and authoritative society. Yeats’s work highlights the deep roots of Irish folk culture and identity, which originate before English occupation and even Roman Catholic conversion centuries earlier. Yeats embraced social order and structure, serving as a senator after Irish independence. But having grown up in an Ireland where only Protestant, English-descended residents could hold government jobs or receive higher education, and where laws banned the Gaelic language, Yeats recognized folk culture’s power, as well as the destruction caused when one culture attempts to erase another. He admired the persistence of Gaelic identity, weaving it into his poetry and writing about it in prose.

The two figures in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” could easily be real—Jane has the free spirit Yeats admired in real life Irish women like Maud Gonne. At the same time, the characters embody Ireland’s internal strife, demonstrating the psychological stress of being Gaelic Irish under English rule and Catholic structures that could be at odds with the tribal, organic, often chaotic version of the Celtic past. The condescending, dismissive, and unempathetic Bishop represents the voice of authority and privilege, unwilling to conceive of Jane as his equal and future sharer of heaven. He rejects her life and experiences as almost subhuman, stressing that her living arrangements remind of an animal pen and that her use as a human being is solely connected to the ability to have and nurse children. Conversely, Jane stands for the complexity and richness of Irish identity. She sees through the Bishop's hypocrisy, and refuses to accept his verdict about her. Instead, she argues that the Bishop's limited and blinkered existence—specifically, his inexperience with love or sex—prevents him from understanding his flock or being able to minister to them in any but the most superficial ways. She rejects his promise of heaven, countering that in being fully open to love, she has already experienced all that his version of heaven has to offer. In the face of the Bishop's clear social superiority—he is so far above Jane that he is only known in the poem by his title—Jane steadfastly holds onto her sense of herself, unwilling to give up her autonomy and integrity to his imposed systems of rules that devalues her.

Old Age and Sexuality

In the poem, Crazy Jane questions the virtue of abstinence and the rejection of the body. While the Bishop reminds her that her refusal to leave the "foul sty" (Line 6)—a description that refers both to her poverty and the Catholic view that the body is an earthly repository of sin that the faithful should long to shed, Jane revels in the experiences that her body has had. For the Bishop, her body was useful for procreation, but now that her "breasts are flat and fallen" (Line 3), she must be done with bodily life. However, Jane rejects this assessment. Her body is a vehicle for love, pleasure, and sexual fulfillment. She has "learned" "truth" in "bodily lowliness" (Lines 9-11)—primarily, she has learned to cast off the societal pressure to be "proud and stiff" (Line 13) to find love. Rather than assuming this prudish demeanor, Jane has acquired the earthy wisdom that "Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement" (Lines 15-16)—romantic love culminates in sexual desire, which is the height of pleasure but takes physical form in the body's least pure organs.

Jane's frank sexuality in old age mirrors Yeats’s own late in life licentiousness (in old age, Yeats had medical treatments to enhance his virility and pursued sexual relationships with many women). For Jane—and for Yeats—there is something sacramental in the pleasures of the body. In “Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers,” the poem following “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” in Words for Music Perhaps, Jane notes the presence of God in the times she was most carried away by physical pleasure. For Jane, the body bears no sin or shame when used in this way.

Ritual and the Afterlife

Yeats’s spiritual beliefs synthesized several cultural and religious attitudes. A Protestant by birth and upbringing, Yeats regarded the Catholic institutions of Ireland with suspicion and at times disdain. But Yeats’s affinity for working class Gaelic Irish people incited interest in some aspects of Catholicism. In addition, he avidly studied the occult and alternative spiritual practices for most of his life. These combined influences made Yeats embrace ritual, tradition, and practices repeated within communities.

“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” relies on repeated sounds and words, using a refrain-like structure to approximate the call-and-response of religious rites or the incantations of pagan worship. For instance, the “fair and foul” repetition and reversal in the second stanza highlight the two-sidedness of identity: sacred and profane, body and soul, pagan and Christian, Catholic and Protestant. In the Crazy Jane poem cycle, Jane’s actions and conversations enact a set of rituals to complete her life. She commemorates passing into old age and death with chants, lessons, philosophy, memory, and movement. Here, announcing to the Bishop her own vision of transcendence, Jane defines her transition to the next world. That transition manifests in the last lines of her talk with the Bishop: “nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent” (Lines 17-18). Dual meanings characterize the entire poem, but especially in the word “sole,” which inevitably calls up its homonym “soul” or spirit, and refers to the “whole,” or unification with the universe as one, rather than occupying “a heavenly mansion” as the Bishop envisions (Line 5). Jane has already seen the true location of an otherworldly mansion—that of Love, which is available to all who are open to the emotion rather than exclusive to those who prostrate themselves to people like the Bishop. Jane redefines and replaces a hollow institutional promise of salvation with a vision in which the broken becomes whole again, and what has been destroyed at its core comes back with renewed vigor in a lasting form.