Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1932

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” has six-line stanzas in iambic meter (alternating stressed and unstressed syllables), alternating six and eight syllables per line. The six-line stanzas follow a ballad stanza form; in keeping with this form, the iambs are slightly irregular, leaning more toward a conversational rhythm. In the poem, every other line uses a strong perfect rhyme, with each of the three stanzas rhyming ABCBDB.

Many of the Crazy Jane poems use refrains; along with this poem’s ballad stanza, these poems embody the group’s title, Words for Music Perhaps. The “perhaps” in the title shows that while Yeats does not intend the poems to be lyrics in a literal fashion, but envisions the works in the context of a folk tradition.

Alliteration

Internal rhyme and alliteration shape “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” creating a tighter structure within the loose ballad meter. Each stanza has interlocking alliterative patterns featuring a set of consonant sounds. Stanza one repeats b and m consonants (“Bishop,” “much,” “breasts,” “be,” “mansion”) alongside f and v sounds (“flat,” “fallen,” “veins,” “heavenly,” “foul”). The second stanza also repeats f sounds, with “fair” and “foul” leading to “friends.” Meanwhile, the lines “Learned in bodily lowliness / And in the heart’s pride” (Lines 11-12), lean on the alliterative and assonant l sound. The cross alliteration of “pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement” (Lines 15-16) and the internal "sole" / "whole" rhyme in line 17 create unity in lines on the topic of wholeness. Yeats’s intricate internal sound patterns echo the braided, circular forms found in Celtic crosses and manuscript embellishments.

Allusion

Crazy Jane's character is drawn from the Hag of Irish folklore and myth. Additionally, Jane’s “fair and foul” line (Lines 7-8) references a different group of hags, Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth. Coupled with her innuendo and her complex moral argument, Jane’s allusion casts her as the intellectual superior to the Bishop, running rings around his pedestrian admonitions. By associating Jane with transforming Irish goddesses and with some of the most powerful and inscrutable women in all of Shakespeare’s work, Yeats also invites readers to see Jane as emblematic of mythic female energy, connected to the mother force of the earth and capable of accessing its occult power.