Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” belongs with Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s late poems about vitality, aging, death, and the persistence of the creative impulse. Published as part of Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems in 1932, collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems, the full Crazy Jane sequence and other poems in this collection address Irish history and folk culture. Yeats weaves together English and Irish traditions, pagan and Christian beliefs, male and female versions of power, and ideas about the boundary between life and death, all while challenging conventional thought in each of these contexts. These poems subvert expectations in theme, but Yeats chooses traditional verse forms for basic structure, often using dazzling combinations of internal rhyme and alliterative runs, as if to create a linguistic version of the interlocking patterns prevalent in Celtic art.

The penultimate poem in the Crazy Jane sequence, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” unites themes from the preceding poems and brings Jane closer to her full power. She faces the Bishop, her complement and antithesis, speaking for the parts of history, myth, and culture often left out of the dominate

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