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  • Crazy Jane

Crazy Jane

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2002
12 minutes
soprano, clarinet, and piano
8 pages (clarinet part)
28 pages (score)
Commissioned by Misook Yun


from W.B. Yeats Words for Music Perhaps

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CRAZY JANE AND THE BISHOP

Bring me to the blasted oak
That I, midnight upon the stroke, 
(All find safety in the tomb.)
May call down curses on his head
Because of my dear Jack that’s dead.
Coxcomb was the least he said:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

Nor was he Bishop when his ban
Banished Jack the Journeyman,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Nor so much as parish priest,
Yet he, an old book in his fist,
Cried that we lived like beast and beast:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

The Bishop has a skin, God knows,
Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Nor can he hide in holy black
The heron’s hunch upon his back,
But a birch-tree stood my Jack:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

Jack had my virginity,
And bids me to the oak, for he
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Wanders out into the night
And there is shelter under it,
But should that other come, I spit:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

CRAZY JANE ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT

‘Love is all
Unsatisfied
That cannot take the whole
Body and soul’;
And that is what Jane said.

‘Take the sour
If you take me,
I can scoff and lour
And scold for an hour.’
That’s certainly the case,’ said he.

‘Naked I lay,
The grass my bed;
Naked and hidden away,
That black day’;
And that is what Jane said.

What can be shown?
What true love be?
All could be known or shown
If time were but gone.’
That’s certainly the case,’ said he.
​

CRAZY JANE REPROVED

I care not what the sailors say:
All those dreadful thunder-stones,
All that storm that blots the day
Can but show that heaven yawns;
Great Europa played the fool
That changed a lover for a bull.
Fol de rol, fol de rol.

To rounds that shell’s elaborate whorl,
Adorning every secret track
With the delicate mother-of pearl,
Made the joints of heaven crack:
So never hang your heart upon
A roaring, ranting journeyman.
Fol de rol, fol de rol.
​​

The words from the CRAZY JANE poems are set to music by permission of A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Micheal B Yeats

​© James Wilding 2025. All content owned or used with permission.
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