Crazy_Jane_Talks_with_the_Bishop

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop William Butler Yeats' "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" is the sixth of twenty-one Crazy Jane poems published in Words for Music Perhaps. The sequence deals with the lost love of an eccentric older woman. The first seven poems in the sequence deal especially with the relationship between body and spirit and Crazy Jane's opinions are shown through dramatic arguments with the local Bishop, who spurs her on with his attempts to bring her to God. The Bishop feels that the soul is the only human aspect worth tending to while Crazy Jane strongly feels that to experience life or love, a unity of being is necessary encompassing the physical and spiritual as well as joy and pain. "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" is central to the purpose of the sequence in that it provides us with Crazy Jane's opinion that "Fair and foul are near of kin, / And fair needs foul." This statement relates to almost everything else spoken of in the poem: the foul resting place of fair deceased lovers, the foul "bodily lowliness" and "heart's pride" involved in sexual love, and the joy and heartbreak of finding true love (Ellmann, 278). This theme of fair and crazy, jane, bishop, poems, love, foul, jack, fair, sequence, soul, journeyman, yeats, man, body, writing, while, two, idea, between, yeats', words, unterecker, true, solid, sexual, never, men, joy, jane's, felt, contrast, both, woman, wholeness, walk, unity, through, talks, storm, spirit, shows, seven, seems, refrain, reader, purpose, poem, perhaps, old, must