18 pages • 36 minutes read
William Butler YeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The exchange between Crazy Jane and the Bishop juxtaposes tribal wisdom and authoritative society. Yeats’s work highlights the deep roots of Irish folk culture and identity, which originate before English occupation and even Roman Catholic conversion centuries earlier. Yeats embraced social order and structure, serving as a senator after Irish independence. But having grown up in an Ireland where only Protestant, English-descended residents could hold government jobs or receive higher education, and where laws banned the Gaelic language, Yeats recognized folk culture’s power, as well as the destruction caused when one culture attempts to erase another. He admired the persistence of Gaelic identity, weaving it into his poetry and writing about it in prose.
The two figures in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” could easily be real—Jane has the free spirit Yeats admired in real life Irish women like Maud Gonne. At the same time, the characters embody Ireland’s internal strife, demonstrating the psychological stress of being Gaelic Irish under English rule and Catholic structures that could be at odds with the tribal, organic, often chaotic version of the Celtic past. The condescending, dismissive, and unempathetic Bishop represents the voice of authority and privilege, unwilling to conceive of Jane as his equal and future sharer of heaven.
By William Butler Yeats
Among School Children
William Butler Yeats
A Prayer for My Daughter
William Butler Yeats
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka
William Butler Yeats
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
William Butler Yeats
Death
William Butler Yeats
Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats
No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
William Butler Yeats
When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats
Beauty
View Collection
Challenging Authority
View Collection
Colonialism & Postcolonialism
View Collection
European History
View Collection
Modernism
View Collection
Modernist Poetry
View Collection
Mortality & Death
View Collection
Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics
View Collection
Power
View Collection
Pride & Shame
View Collection
Religion & Spirituality
View Collection
Short Poems
View Collection