William Butler Yeats

A Crazed Girl

A Crazed Girl - meaning Summary

Madness and Artistic Triumph

Yeats presents a disturbed young woman whose fractured inward life becomes a source of spontaneous art. Despite physical injury and psychological division she improvises music and poetic song amid a ship's cargo. Her utterance is not ordinary speech but a savage, unnamed music that both wounds and exalts her. The poem frames madness as a condition that produces intense, heroic creativity rather than simple collapse.

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That crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

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