Yeats Didn't Stop Learning At Sixty-two : Teresa Gibson
"Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" is a short poem three six-line stanzas in length; these lines vary between tetrameter and trimeter and rhyme abcbdb, rather like ballad meter. The first stanza places Crazy Jane and the Bishop in a chance meeting on a road. The Bishop rebukes Crazy Jane for her life and urges her to make amends. After all her body is old now, her "breasts... flat and fallen...." Presently her body will die, her "veins...be dry." She should ignore her body and emphasize her soul such as was suggested in the previous poem. The refined spirit freed from the dross of matter "lives in a heavenly mansion" while the spirit tied to the flesh lives "in a foul sty."
The word "foul" suggests the corruptibility and lowliness of the body, especially an aged one while "sty" being a place where pigs live suggests the animal nature of the body and its sexuality. Crazy Jane answers back in the last two stanzas. She notes the kinship, and interdependence of soul "Fair" and body "foul." She's old; therefore, her friends are gone," "a truth" she can't deny because of her acquaintance with death "grave" and sickness "bed." But her experience with both physical reality "bodily lowliness" and spirituality or intellectuality, "heart's pride" have given her insight--she is "learned." The third stanza asserts that one has to undergo what some may see as a humiliating, lowly experience--the sex act in order to be a fulfilled person. Ideal love can only be sought through physical experience. A woman or perhaps any person "too proud and stiff" to surrender to her sexuality forfeits fulfillment both of body and soul. The element of sexuality most distressing to the fastidious, the placement of sex organs near or in organs of excrement" is stressed here. The final two lines--"For nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent." are richly suggestive. "Sole" refers to oneness or the integration of the personality achieved only by bringing together both spiritual and physical selves in one's sexuality; the word also puns on soul, one finds fulfillment for one's soul through physical experience. "Whole works in a similar manner, referring primarily to the wholeness or fulfillment of a being and punning on hole, the female sexual organ. Both soul("sole") and body(hole) come to fulfillment in sexuality. Paradoxically wholeness is obtained by being "rent" literally the tearing of hymen, and symbolically sexual experience in general.
Like the fool in Shakespearean plays, Crazy Jane is wiser than her apparent betters, here the supposedly wise man of the Church, the Bishop. Interestingly the views presented by Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium" are refinement of the Bishop's view that one should detach one's soul from the lowly and transient body. "Sailing to Byzantium" is an excellent poem, but Yeats obviously did not stop learning at sixty-two. In a letter of his old age he wrote, "I shall be a sinful man to the end and think upon my deathbed of all the nights I wasted in my youth." (The Norton Anthology of English Literature Revised Vol.2, p.1565)
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
1933
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
"Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty."
"Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul," I cried.
"My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
"A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not be rent."
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