Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

The poems included in Words for Music Perhaps draw from English folk song traditions; a character called “Crazy Jane” appears as far back as the 18th century in ballads. Other poems from The Winding Stair collection follow the character of mad Tom, whose antecedent Tom O’Bedlam also comes out of English ballad tradition. Like most of Yeats’s later poetic work, these poems center on aging, death, and the legacy left behind through art. Yeats honored parts of life often sidestepped or denigrated: the world of physical desire and the importance of transgression, which Yeats often links directly to Irish culture and tradition, demonstrating his belief that a more ancient culture offers an authenticity that the civilized world of hierarchy and rules has erased.

“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” returns in topic to the first work in the Crazy Jane sequence, “Crazy Jane and the Bishop.” In that first poem, Jane addresses the absent Bishop, cursing him for his role in her beloved Jack’s death as she meets Jack’s ghost. Two refrains frame the poem: “all find safety in the tomb,” and “the solid man and the coxcomb.” Jane reverses the Bishop’s declaration of himself as the “solid man”; for Jane, Jack represents “the solid man” while the Bishop stands as “the coxcomb.