A Crazed Girl

Description

The eponymous ‘Crazed Girl’ of this poem is the Irish actor, singer, and poet Margot Ruddock (1907–51), who was twenty-seven when she met the sixty-nine year old Yeats in October 1934. Their tumultuous romantic affair and artistic relationship ended when the mentally unstable Ruddock was permanently institutionalised in late 1937.  In May 1936, Ruddock arrived unexpectedly in Majorca from Barcelona, to see Yeats. In Barcelona, she had been locked in a room by well-meaning friends. In her escape, she fell from a window and crashed through the roof of a barber’s shop, breaking her knee. The next day she fled from the clinic where her knee had been treated and, hoping to return to Yeats in Majorca, hid in the hold of a boat.