“A Crazed Girl” by William Butler Yeats is a sad poem which depicts truth about life.The poet describes a girl who is trying to live in her fantasy world (which far from normality) by the way of her craziness. When you are insecure you do crazy things. Similarly the girl is lost and feels insecure. She is insecure because her lover has left her alone in the world with no one to look up to her or admire her.
Yeats focuses on the fading of the mind and other changes that take place with the aging. It speaks about a child who is not aware about her own pains and do not know where she is. Later on with time passing by, she finds herself sailing on the sea, and realizes this sea had taken her lover. This is the reason she wants the sea to kill her, because the pain of losing her lover is unbearable. On one hand she wants herself to be dead by drowning in the sea but on the other hand she is scared and choose to forget her sorrows and pains by the way of music and dance.
It is an incredibly strong and touching poem. Yeast taps the feminine sensibility in the poem with the line: “A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing/Heroically lost, heroically found.”
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The girl is lonely she do not want to see reality and is singing and dancing to hide her pain and loneliness. She is in search of her lover. Her lover is dead and she also wants to reach the place where her lover is now, by the way of drowning herself to the sea. When she addresses the sea, she feels like sounds of the ocean was communication to her.She is crazy, she is no longer able to hide her pain by the way of singing and dancing, she is frustrated with the fact there is no one to admire her.
There is a sense of beauty and madness in the poem. The craziness of the girl doesn’t mean she is mad or insane, but the poet wants her craziness to be seen as a path to liberation. He wants the world to know that the girl who is liberating herself from all the pains and fear by the way of dance, music and poetry is brave. She did not choose to shut down her world and close all her contacts with everyone, rather she chose to face the world bravely despite what happened to her.
The girl herself is not aware of her heroic deeds. The poet dives inside the soul of the girl to showcase the hero inside her to the entire world. The girl is scared of the sea and is in immense pain because of the death of her lover but still manages to smile and enjoy her life and pretend to the world that she is happy and rejoicing her life.