Crazy Jane and the Bishop
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: Bring me to the blasted oak
In brief
SummaryCrazy Jane curses the Bishop who banished her dead lover Jack.
Crazy Jane asks to be brought at midnight to a blasted oak, where she will curse the Bishop for what he did to her lover, Jack the Journeyman, now dead. Before he was even a parish priest, the Bishop banished Jack and, with a book in his fist, said the two of them lived like beasts. She mocks his wrinkled skin and hunched back, and sets against them her Jack, straight as a birch tree. Jack's ghost still calls her to the oak, where there is shelter; if the Bishop comes, she will spit.
Lines to remember
The solid man and the coxcomb.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 7A curse at midnight
Jane wants to stand at the blasted oak on the stroke of midnight and call down curses on the Bishop, for the sake of her dead Jack. The Bishop had called Jack a coxcomb, and that was the least of it. Two refrains frame the stanza: the tomb as a safe place, and the solid man set against the coxcomb.
Lines 8 to 14The banishment
He was not yet a bishop, nor even a parish priest, when he banished Jack. Clutching an old book, he cried that the lovers lived like beasts. Jane recalls his words with contempt.
Lines 15 to 21Goose foot and heron
The Bishop's skin is wrinkled like a goose's foot, and his black clerical clothes cannot hide the heron's hunch on his back. Jack, by contrast, stood straight as a birch tree. The bird images make the Bishop comic and ugly.
Lines 22 to 28Shelter under the oak
Jack took her virginity, and now, wandering the night as a ghost, he calls her to the oak, where there is shelter. Should the other man come, she will spit. The last refrain leaves open which of the two is the real "coxcomb".
Themes
Body against Church
The Bishop stands for official religion, with his "old book" and "holy black"; Jane and Jack stand for bodily love. Jane refuses his judgement that they lived "like beast and beast", and turns the insults back on him, a man whose own body is withered and bent.
Love beyond death
Jack is dead but still bids her to the oak. The refrain about the tomb suggests that the grave is a refuge from the world's judgement. Jane's loyalty outlasts death, and the midnight tryst at the blasted tree is part curse, part love meeting.
Solid man and coxcomb
The refrain sets two kinds of man side by side. The Bishop called Jack a coxcomb, a vain fool, but Jane's portrait reverses the labels: Jack is upright as a birch, and the pompous Bishop is the real coxcomb. The refrain lets the reader weigh them.
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 in the sequence, spoken by an old, wild countrywoman who defends the body and passion against the Church.
Yeats is said to have based Jane partly on an outspoken old woman who lived near Gort in County Galway. The Bishop returns in "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop", and Jack in "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman".
Form
Four seven-line stanzas. Each has five lines of four beats, rhyming as a couplet and then a triplet, broken by a bracketed refrain in line 3 and closed by a second refrain in line 7. The double refrain gives the poem the feel of a chant or charm, fitting for a curse spoken at midnight.