LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,026)
  • Text Authors (19,309)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,112)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)

Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman
 (Sung text for setting by S. Grill)
 Matches original text
Language: English 
I know, although when looks meet
I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the door unlatched
The sooner love is gone,
For love is but a skein unwound
Between the dark and dawn.

A lonely ghost the ghost is
That to God shall come;
I - love's skein upon the ground,
My body in the tomb -
Shall leap into the light lost
In my mother's womb.

But were I left to lie alone
In an empty bed,
The skein so bound us ghost to ghost
When he turned his head
passing on the road that night,
Mine must walk when dead. 

Composition:

    Set to music by Stanley Grill (b. 1953), "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman", 1999, copyright © 2000 [ soprano, flute, violin, viola, cello and piano ], from Crazy Jane Sings, no. 4, confirmed with an online score

Text Authorship:

  • by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman", appears in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, first published 1932

See other settings of this text.


Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2009-01-03
Line count: 18
Word count: 103

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris