Crazy Jane on the Mountain
Crazy Jane on the Mountain - meaning Summary
Reckoning with Power and Loss
The poem presents Crazy Jane as a blunt, disenchanted speaker who refuses moralizing respectability and instead meditates on corruption, violence, and personal sorrow. She contrasts clerical and royal authority with scenes of brutality and abandonment, then recounts a painful, intimate moment on a mountain where mythic figures appear and she responds with a stone kiss and open weeping. The voice mixes irony, mythic allusion, and raw feeling to question power and loss.
Read Complete AnalysesI 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.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.