Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1932. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2028, 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 2028.
It begins: I know, although when looks meet
In brief
SummaryCrazy Jane fears love binds her ghost to Jack's after death.
Crazy Jane knows that although she trembles when her eyes meet Jack's, the more freely she gives herself the sooner love goes: love is only a skein of thread unwound between dark and dawn. The ghost that goes to God goes alone, she says; once love's thread lies on the ground and her body is in the tomb, she will leap into the light she lost when she was conceived. But if she had slept alone, the thread would have bound her to Jack ever since the night he turned his head on the road, and her ghost would walk after death.
Lines to remember
For love is but a skein unwound
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6A skein unwound
Jane admits that she trembles to the bone when their looks meet, yet she knows that the more she leaves her door unlatched, the sooner love runs out. Love is a skein, a length of thread, unwound in one night between dark and dawn.
Lines 7 to 12Into the light
The soul that comes to God is a lonely ghost. With love's thread spent on the ground and her body buried, she will leap into the light she lost in her mother's womb, returning to where she came from, free of attachment.
Lines 13 to 18A walking ghost
The last stanza turns: had she been left to lie alone in an empty bed, the unused thread would have bound her ghost to Jack's from the moment he turned his head on the road that night. Then her ghost would walk, restless, after death.
Themes
Desire fulfilled
The poem makes a startling argument: love given freely uses itself up and so sets the soul free, while love held back binds the ghost to earth. Jane's frankness about the "door unlatched" is part of her defiance of conventional morality.
The soul after death
Jane imagines the ghost going to God alone and leaping into a light lost at birth. Unfulfilled love would make her a walking ghost, tied to the place and the man. The poem draws on Yeats's interest in the fate of souls after death.
The thread of love
The skein runs through all three stanzas: unwound between dark and dawn, lying spent on the ground, and binding "ghost to ghost". One homely image of thread carries the whole argument.
Context
The poem belongs to the sequence Words for Music Perhaps, first collected by the Cuala Press in 1932 and then in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). It is one of seven Crazy Jane poems. Jack the Journeyman is the lover whose banishment by the Bishop Jane curses in "Crazy Jane and the Bishop".
Form
Three six-line stanzas in ballad metre, alternating lines of four and three beats and rhyming on the short lines, some only half rhymes (bone and gone, come and tomb). The simple song shape carries a difficult metaphysical argument, and the turn at "But" in the last stanza reverses what came before.