Crazy Jane on God

Crazy Jane sets passing lovers and wars against the permanence of God.

Crazy Jane, Yeats's outspoken old countrywoman, thinks about things that come and go. A lover of one night came when he pleased and left at dawn whether she liked it or not. Armies once fought in a narrow pass, with banners and armoured horses. A house that had stood empty and ruined since childhood suddenly lit up from door to roof, as if the past were being played again. She had wild Jack for a lover, and though men have passed over her body like a road, it makes no complaint but keeps singing. Each stanza ends with the same calm refrain: all things remain in God.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 6Lover of a night

   Jane remembers a lover who came when he wished and left at dawn whether she wanted him to or not. She shrugs it off: men come and go. The refrain answers that loss with a larger certainty: everything that has happened is kept in God.

2. Lines 7 to 12The battle in the pass

   The second stanza leaps to a vision of an old battle: banners choking the sky, soldiers marching, armoured horses neighing in a narrow pass. The details come in short, present-tense bursts, as if the battle were still happening. The refrain suggests that in a sense it is, since in God nothing is lost.

3. Lines 13 to 18The lit house

   Before the watchers' eyes, a house that had stood empty and ruinous since their childhood suddenly lights up from door to top. The image suggests a haunting, the past replaying itself in the present. Once again the refrain treats it as a sign that all things are held in God.

4. Lines 19 to 24Like a road

   Jane returns to herself. She had wild Jack for a lover, and her body, like a road that men pass over, makes no moan but sings on. The simile is frank and unashamed. Her refusal to complain turns into praise, and the refrain becomes her song.

Themes

Context

The poem belongs to Words for Music Perhaps, a sequence of songs first gathered in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1932) and then in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). Crazy Jane speaks several of them: an old woman, poor, bawdy and wise, who stands up for the body against the respectable piety of the Bishop.

Here, unusually, she speaks of God, but her faith is her own. Her God does not judge her lovers; He holds everything that has ever happened. The idea that the past survives and can reappear as a vision was important to Yeats in these years, and it gives this short song its strange, calm authority.

Form

Four six-line stanzas of very short lines, two or three beats each, closing on the same refrain. Many rhymes are half rhymes ("would" and "God", "sky" and "neigh"), which suits a folk song. The refrain returns like a response in church, and its steady certainty contrasts with the restless comings and goings in each stanza.