can anyone help me out with this poem? I'm needed to analyze all the poetry devices that is used inside this poem and also its meaning. I would definitely appreciate anyone can help me out. Thanks

There is some info. here: [www.emule.com]

and here:


[www.google.com]



Les

It's been discussed before:

[tinyurl.com]

[tinyurl.com]

It is one of a series of poems, titled Words for Music Perhaps.


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.'


They are all interesting reading. Lots appear on the web, such as:

[poetry.poetryx.com]

In this one, my take is that Crazy Jane is not mad at all. Instead, it is the Bishop who is a few ants short of a picnic. He wants Jane to give up her life of worldly pleasures, opting instead for his promised heaven. Jane has taken the low road in life, choosing instead to live in the present.

There are puns in all the CJ poems. For example, see the word 'rent' in this one. Rent can mean torn, but also paid for a little at a time (like a prostitute, mebbe? Whole versus hole, that is). That love has put his mansion in a place of excrement has been joked about for centuries. 'Why did God put the dining room right next to the garbage dump?', for example.

Technically, there are three six-line stanzas, rhyming abcbdb. Is this significant? Not that I can see - no such established form (like a sonnet) that Yeats is using. Lines are both trimeter and tetrameter, again for no reason that I can discern, except to mimic a sort of ballad meter perhaps.

Devices used could include metaphors. Are her dry breasts metaphors for a wasted life? Grave means death? Bed means pleasure? Alliteration - look at all the 'f' words: flat, fallen, fair, foul. I am not gonna do them all for you, though, since one learns by doing the work oneself.

Search Google for 'poetic devices' and/or 'prosody' and see which ones you can match up with those used by Yeats:

[storytrail.com]

[www.kyrene.k12.az.us]

Stephen Fryer posted this article from an Enlish Poetry journal which may be relevant: [www.poetrymagazines.org.uk]


Les

It may well be relevant, but I found myself snoring loudly about a third of the way through and never found out. I see also above I left out the rest of the pun about whole/hole and rent/rent - it's the hymen, innit. I will, um, slide over what part of her anatomy can be pround & stiff, being far too genteel, of course.

Hugh, I wonder if Yeats was trying to get by with something by introducing the character of Crazy Jane. It's not typical of his other work and I think some of it must have been written with tongue in cheek.


Les

Right - either that or a way for the smiling public man to safely show his cynical side (hey, I'm alliterative!). Much like Blake hid behind his poetic cyphers to express disdain for church, state, marriage, child labor practices, and moral values of his age.

I am not sure in what order the 'poems for music perhaps' were written, and it probably doesn't matter. Crazy Jane is a girl from the other side of the tracks, basically living life in the gutter. She gets (literally) screwed by Jack the Journeyman, who is in turn bent over by the Bishop and banished for being a coxcomb (a fop, and no pun intended?). Why that would be a problem for the Bishop, I am not sure. Jack later dies, love lost to Janie, who always considered him a much better man than the Bishop. I seem to remember he became a sailor after the banishment, and Jane philosophically vowed never again to 'hang her heart upon a roaring ranting journeyman, fol de rol'.

Still, CJ seems to retain her faith in God, his earthly representatives not withstanding, much the same as Blake, sure. 'All things remain in God', she believes.

Does Yeats wrap matters up in the two below?


Crazy Jane on the Mountain

I am tired of cursing the Bishop,
(Said Crazy Jane)
Nine books or nine hats
Would not make him a man.
I have found something worse
To meditate on.
A King had some beautiful cousins.
But where are they gone?
Battered to death in a cellar,
And he stuck to his throne.
Last night I lay on the mountain.
(Said Crazy Jane)
There in a two-horsed carriage
That on two wheels ran
Great-bladdered Emer sat.
Her violent man
Cuchulain sat at her side;
Thereupon'
Propped upon my two knees,
I kissed a stone
I lay stretched out in the dirt
And I cried tears down.

[for Emer, see [en.wikipedia.org]

-------------------------


Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers


I found that ivory image there
Dancing with her chosen youth,
But when he wound her coal-black hair
As though to strangle her, no scream
Or bodily movement did I dare,
Eyes under eyelids did so gleam;
Love is like the lion's tooth.

When she, and though some said she played
I said that she had danced heart's truth,
Drew a knife to strike him dead,
I could but leave him to his fate;
For no matter what is said
They had all that had their hate;
Love is like the lion's tooth.

Did he die or did she die?
Seemed to die or died they both?
God be with the times when I
Cared not a thraneen [grass] for what chanced
So that I had the limbs to try
Such a dance as there was danced -
Love is like the lion's tooth.


So - Irish Republicanism replaces her religion, and love is destined to cause us pain in the end, so live life for the moment, accepting whatever pleasure we can at the time? Just guessing, right.