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Anyone who has been to high school in the English-speaking world probably knows a little William Butler Yeats. “Only God. can love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair”; or “An old man is but a paltry thing” from “Sailing to Byzantium”; or “Cast a cold eye on life, on death” from “Under Ben Bulben.” But “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” is a poem perhaps less studied in high school.
W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud were contemporaries. Yate's “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” gives us a chance to think about the two of them together: the Irish poet, playwright, and politician who was deeply concerned with Irish identity and Irish nationalism- and the Viennese doctor who “discovered” (better “uncovered”) the unconscious and to whom readers of DIVISION/Review owe their intellectual and professional lives. There is evidence that Yeats read Freud, although I can find none that Freud read Yeats-except that there are references to Yeats as early as 1921 in psychoanalytic journals (in The Psychoanalytic Review, for example), with which Freud would have been familiar. On the matter of received moral hypocrisies, their views were remarkably similar.
“Crazy Jane” is the embodiment and personification of earthy Irish peasant wisdom in a series of poems that Yeats wrote in the 1930s, toward the end of his life.
“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”
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 been rent”
Yeats, especially as he grew older, had the gift of being able to boil a dissonant complexity down to its essence