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.” In the final lines, Jane issues a warning that if she sees the coxcomb instead of her lost Jack, she will spit on him. That is exactly what happens five poems later, when the title “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” describes the encounter promised in the first poem.

Still, the opening of “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” seems benign. “I met the Bishop on the road” (Line 1), Jane begins—but she does not go on to spit on the Bishop directly. Instead, she describes their encounter with understatement as a dialog: “And much said he and I” (Line 2). The sharp edge of this line comes across even without the context of the first poem: We are being asked to imagine a scene of the Bishop seriously conversing with the lowly Jane as an equal. Before we hear what either says, Jane sets up their meeting to be a kind of religious debate, underplaying the encounter so that the Bishop's initial words, a highly personal and seemingly uncalled for attack, is all the more jarring.

The Bishop points out Jane’s advanced age in an incredibly demeaning way, stressing that she is no longer a fertile woman by zeroing in on her having lost the ability to nurse a child: " Those breasts are flat and fallen now" (Line 3). While a Bishop’s vocation includes leading them to a better afterlife, this Bishop’s method shows a lack of pastoral warmth, as he eagerly describes her body as near death. The Bishop condescends to Jane, wielding his class and authority. The “heavenly mansion” (Line 5) he describes to Jane sounds flat coming from him, considering that he believes she prefers her “foul sty” (Line 6). His offer of salvation reeks of insincerity—someone of his standing cannot imagine sharing heaven with the likes of her. This Bishop represents the worst of Catholic domination over working class Irish; lacking any real power under British Protestant rule, the Catholic hierarchy instead oppressed the only people left to grind down, the faithful.

Jane seizes upon the Bishop’s words and echoes a famous line from the witches in Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth: “Fair and foul are near of kin / And fair needs foul,” Jane says (Lines 7-8). However, her rendition of Shakespeare's "Fair is foul and foul is fair" slightly alters the meaning: It is not that good and bad are one and the same, but that each needs the other as an opposing force. Instead of spitting, Jane demonstrates her sophisticated understanding of language, despite the Bishop’s judgment of her appearance. Like Shakespeare's witches, Crazy Jane embodies chaotic power, not mental illness. Jane does not submit to control by authority or systems.

Emotion rules Jane in the form of her devotion to Jack, her lost love. Like the Irish hag goddess the Cailleach, who waits by the sea for the return of her spouse the sea god, Jane’s continued residency in this world is a lesson in loss and absence. Her steadfast love despite destruction and separation mirrors the persistence of Irish culture and belief against Roman and English colonization that attempted to dismantle it. Yeats designs Jane as an avatar of Gaelic virtue. Mythic culture, chthonic wisdom, the physical body and the land itself manifest through Jane. For her, fair must have foul as life must have death. To reject foulness rejects the human—something the Bishop so pointedly does in the first stanza. Jane wrests away the Bishop’s authority by harking to lessons “learned in bodily lowliness” (Line 11), a liquidly assonant phrase referring to worldly understanding unavailable to a celibate Church official. Jane questions the Bishop’s ability to judge her, since his role does not allow him a complete understanding of the world.

The final stanza elevates Jane's rebuttal from scrappy and personal to poignant and universal. Love, Jane explains, transforms the body in destructive and even humiliating ways. Exhausted from pining for Jack and from a life of lessons “learned in bodily lowliness” (Line 11), Jane possesses the authority to speak on love’s power to debilitate and dismantle. “A woman can be proud and stiff” (Line 13) when in love, Jane explains, showing how love can seem ennobling. But Love, when personified, “pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement” (Lines 15-16). The lines have a double meaning. Literally, Jane is saying that the genitals, used to express physical love, are next to the body's excretive organs. At the same time, Yeats presents the idea that only when love takes us to the darkest places can transcendence emerge. She repeats the Bishop's first-stanza word "mansion" to make the point that while he half-heartedly speaks of an otherworldly palace, she has experienced all that the afterlife can offer on earth. It's not "heaven" but "love" that provides the best pleasure house. Jane’s last words in the poem offer a suggestive pun, but also call up the idea of eternal oneness: “For nothing can be sole or whole/ That has not been rent” (Lines 17-18). The pun rests on the word "whole" and its homonym "hole"—here, alluding to a woman's first sexual experience, in which the hymen is "rent," or broken. Purity and virginity only account for a certain kind of perspective. What has not been broken cannot unify, and for Jane (and for Yeats), the only valuable kind of wholeness comes out of destruction. But the dual meanings here go further: The more important homonyms are “sole” and “soul,” the central question of the poem. Jane carries the knowledge of the broken: a broken woman, a broken people, a broken world.

On its surface, Yeats’s “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” shows an ironic, salty exchange between an irrepressible old woman and an upright, unsympathetic clergyman. But Jane’s literary heritage along with Yeats’s role in Irish culture and politics casts the exchange as more than a folk ballad. In Jane, he personifies the fecundity and chaos of the living world, even as it turns as blasted and dry as the oak in the first Crazy Jane poem. Yeats and Jane find solace in the wisdom closest to the earth, the place of death, but also the source of life.