The Crazy Woman

“The Crazy Woman” is a lyric poem as it is short, compact, and expresses personal and serious feelings. At the same time, the poem has its tongue-in-cheek elements, as the crazy woman is not crazy so much as an independent person doing what she wants. The crazy woman is the speaker, so the title refers to the poem’s narrator—a woman who, later on, people refer to as crazy.

The woman starts the poem on a confident note. Her tone is assertive, defiant, and declarative. The woman announces, “I shall not sing a May song” (Line 1). The “not” adds another element to the tone. “Not” is a negative adverb, and the speaker maintains a somewhat negative tone here in multiple ways. The tone is negative because the speaker wants to sing about things that are not typically positive. Secondly, the tone is negative because the speaker refuses to do an expected thing—she is not singing in May.

The speaker does not want to sing in May because such a song would “be gay” (Line 2), or happy. The woman does not want to sing a happy song, so she will “wait until November / And sing a song of gray” (Lines 3-4).