Crazy Jane grown old looks at the Dancers
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 found that ivory image there
In brief
SummaryOld Crazy Jane watches a dance of love and violence and envies it.
Crazy Jane, now old, watches a young woman dance with her chosen partner. When he winds her black hair as if to strangle her, Jane dares not scream or move, so fierce is the gleam of their eyes. When the woman draws a knife to strike him, Jane lets him take his chance: whatever anyone says, lovers who share such hate have everything. She cannot tell whether either died, or only seemed to. She wishes for the days when she cared nothing for what happened, if only she had the limbs for such a dance. The refrain says that love is like the lion's tooth.
Lines to remember
Love is like the lion's tooth.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 7The strangling dance
Jane sees the "ivory image", a pale young woman, dancing with her chosen youth. When he winds her coal-black hair as if to strangle her, Jane neither screams nor moves, held by the gleam of eyes under eyelids. The refrain names love's savagery.
Lines 8 to 14The knife
Some thought the woman was only playing, but Jane says she danced the truth of her heart. When she draws a knife to kill him, Jane leaves him to his fate, because those who had their hate had everything.
Lines 15 to 21Did they die
Did one die, or both, or did they only seem to. Jane does not care. She longs for the days when she would not have cared a straw what happened, if only she had the limbs to dance such a dance.
Themes
Love and hate
The refrain "Love is like the lion's tooth" makes love a predator. The dance mixes desire with the threat of strangling and stabbing, and Jane sees this as fullness, not horror: those who have their hate have all. For Jane, passion includes cruelty.
Art and truth
The dance is a performance, and some say the woman only played. Jane insists she "danced heart's truth". Whether the lovers died or "Seemed to die" is left open, as in a play, where enacted passion can be truer than life.
Age and longing
The poem's last movement is Jane's envy. She is old and her body cannot dance, but she regrets nothing except the lost limbs. Her longing is not for safety but for the chance to risk everything again.
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, here showing Jane as an old woman looking back.
Form
Three seven-line stanzas in four-beat lines, rhyming ABACACB, each ending on the refrain about the lion's tooth, which rhymes with line 2. The long, winding sentences, full of interruptions, mimic the tangled movements of the dance.