Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1932from The Winding Stair and Other Poems

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 met the Bishop on the road

In brief

Summary

Crazy Jane answers a bishop's warning with a defence of body and love.

Crazy Jane meets the Bishop on the road. He tells her that her body is old, her breasts flat and fallen, and that she should turn her mind to a heavenly mansion instead of living in a foul sty. She answers that fair and foul are close relations, and each needs the other. Her friends are gone, but what she has learned through the lowliness of the body and the pride of the heart has been proved by both the grave and the bed. Love, she says, has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement, for nothing can be whole that has not first been torn.

Lines to remember

Fair and foul are near of kin,

For nothing can be sole or whole

Line by line

Lines 1 to 6The Bishop's advice
Jane meets the Bishop and they talk at length. He reminds her bluntly that her body is ageing and will soon dry up, and urges her to live in a heavenly mansion, not some foul sty. His advice is both pious and cruel.
Lines 7 to 12Fair needs foul
Jane cries back that fair and foul are near of kin, and that the fair needs the foul. Her friends are gone, but that truth has been confirmed by grave and bed, by death and by love. She learned it through the body's lowliness and the heart's pride.
Lines 13 to 18Love's mansion
A woman intent on love can be proud and stiff, she says, but Love has pitched his mansion in "The place of excrement", taking the Bishop's own word and turning it against him. The closing lines give the poem's paradox: nothing can be single or whole unless it has been torn.

Themes

Body and soul

The Bishop separates them: the body is a sty, the soul belongs in a heavenly mansion. Jane refuses the split. Love's mansion, she says, is built in the body's lowest place, so the spiritual cannot be reached by despising the flesh. The poem gives the last word to the body, and to a woman the Church has written off.

Opposites

Beauty and ugliness, high and low, heaven and sty depend on each other. The poem is built on such pairs, grave and bed, lowliness and pride, mansion and excrement. For Jane, as for Yeats, truth lives in the joining of opposites, not in choosing one side.

Wholeness through suffering

The final paradox is that nothing can be whole unless it has first been torn. Being torn, in love, in childbirth, in loss, is the way to completeness. The line also hides a pun on sole and soul: even the soul must be broken open to be made whole. Jane's hard life becomes her authority.

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). In earlier poems of the sequence the Bishop is Jane's old enemy, the man who drove away her lover Jack the Journeyman. Here, when both are old, she has the last word.

It is the best known of the Crazy Jane poems and shows the late Yeats's delight in shocking respectability. Its belief that body and soul, high and low, cannot be separated echoes "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" from the same collection, where the self chooses to live its life again, with all its shame and folly.

Form

Three six-line stanzas of ballad lines alternating roughly four and three beats, with the even lines rhyming on one sound through each stanza ("I", "dry", "sty"). The plain ballad form suits a quarrel on a country road, and the last stanza's rhymes land with blunt, shocking force.