Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

The exchange between Crazy Jane and the Bishop juxtaposes tribal wisdom and authoritative society. Yeats’s work highlights the deep roots of Irish folk culture and identity, which originate before English occupation and even Roman Catholic conversion centuries earlier. Yeats embraced social order and structure, serving as a senator after Irish independence. But having grown up in an Ireland where only Protestant, English-descended residents could hold government jobs or receive higher education, and where laws banned the Gaelic language, Yeats recognized folk culture’s power, as well as the destruction caused when one culture attempts to erase another. He admired the persistence of Gaelic identity, weaving it into his poetry and writing about it in prose.

The two figures in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” could easily be real—Jane has the free spirit Yeats admired in real life Irish women like Maud Gonne. At the same time, the characters embody Ireland’s internal strife, demonstrating the psychological stress of being Gaelic Irish under English rule and Catholic structures that could be at odds with the tribal, organic, often chaotic version of the Celtic past. The condescending, dismissive, and unempathetic Bishop represents the voice of authority and privilege, unwilling to conceive of Jane as his equal and future sharer of heaven.