A Crazed Girl
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1938. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2034, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2034.
It begins: That crazed girl improvising her music
In brief
SummaryA young woman in breakdown becomes, for Yeats, a heroic, singing figure.
Yeats watches a girl in the grip of madness: she improvises music and poetry, dances on the shore, climbs and falls without knowing where she is going, hides among a steamship's cargo and breaks her knee-cap. Rather than pity her, he declares her "A beautiful lofty thing", lost and found in a heroic way. In the second stanza, whatever disaster strikes, she stays wound up in her own desperate music. Among the bales and baskets she makes no ordinary sense, only a song to the hungry sea.
Lines to remember
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Line by line
Lines 1 to 8The poet's verdict
One long sentence gathers her actions: improvising, dancing on the shore, her soul divided against itself, hiding in a ship's cargo, her knee broken. Only at the end does the main verb arrive, as Yeats declares her lofty and heroic. The delay makes the verdict land with force.
Lines 9 to 14Wound in music
Whatever happens to her, she stands wrapped in "desperate music", and the repeated "wound" suggests both being wound up like thread and being hurt. Her triumph is not sense but song: amid the bales and baskets she cries out to a starved, hungry sea.
Themes
Madness and art
The girl improvises music and poetry even as her mind splits "in division from itself". Yeats treats her breakdown as a kind of pure, unplanned art: her song makes no "common intelligible sound", yet he calls it a triumph. The poem honours intensity over reason, as many of his late poems do.
The heroic
The phrase "heroically lost, heroically found" lifts a painful episode into the language of heroes. A broken knee-cap and a hiding place among cargo are hardly grand, but the poet insists on seeing greatness in her refusal to be ordinary, whatever disaster comes.
The sea
The poem opens on the shore and ends with her cry to the "hungry sea". The sea stands for something vast and devouring that matches her state of mind, and it gives the poem its last, open-ended note.
Context
The poem was first published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938). It grew from Yeats's intense friendship with the actress and poet Margot Ruddock, whose breakdown in Majorca in 1936 lies behind this poem and "Sweet Dancer". The details of cargo, shore and broken knee reflect that episode.
The phrase "A beautiful lofty thing" returns in "Beautiful Lofty Things", from the same book, where Yeats uses it for the great figures of his past.
Form
Fourteen lines in two stanzas of eight and six, in loose lines of three or four beats with scattered rhymes and half rhymes (shore, where, declare; found, wound, sound). The first stanza is one sentence that holds back its main verb until line 6, so the reader, like the girl, climbs and falls before arriving.