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“Crusoe in England” Introduction
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"Crusoe in England" appears in Geography III (1976), the final collection Elizabeth Bishop published during her lifetime. The poem is a dramatic monologue voiced by Robinson Crusoe, literature's most famous castaway (the hero of Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe), long after he escapes his desert island and returns home to England. Though Crusoe is inventive and resourceful on the island, he recalls being bored and lonely there—until the arrival of the young man named Friday, with whom he forged a romantic bond. Now, years after Friday's untimely death, he is lonely in a different way altogether. The longest poem of Bishop's career, "Crusoe in England" is often read as an indirect reflection on her life and art as well as a meditation on solitude, love, and grief.
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“Crusoe in England” Summary
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The newspapers say another volcanic eruption just took place. Last week, they reported that a ship's crew saw an eruption create a whole new island. First they noticed a plume of smoke ten miles in the distance, then the first mate, watching through binoculars, saw a black, fly-like speck—probably made of the volcanic rock called basalt—form and harden on the horizon. The crew named the new island. But the sad little island I lived on still hasn't been found again or named again. All of the books about my experience have told the story wrong.
My island contained 52 pathetic little volcanoes, which I could scale with a few long, agile steps—volcanoes that were totally inactive, like piles of soot. I used to perch on the crater-rim of the tallest volcano and tally up the others, which rose like bare, gray bodies whose heads had exploded. I'd muse that if they were as big as I expected volcanoes to be, I must have turned into a giant. And if I had, I didn't dare work out how big the island's goats and turtles were, or the seagulls, or the waves that rolled in one on top of another—gleaming rollers surrounding the six-sided island, bearing down but never quite reaching the shore intact, gleaming even though the weather was generally cloudy.
The island was like a dumping ground for the rest of the region's spare clouds, which gathered above the volcano tops. Those dry craters were still very hot. Did their heat cause the island's frequent rain? Were they the source of the island's hissing noises? Turtles with huge shells waddled past, hissing like kettles of tea on the stove. (Obviously, I would've shortened my life, or a few others' lives, in exchange for any kind of real kettle.) The volcanic lava seemed to hiss as it spilled toward the ocean, but I'd turn around and find the noise was coming from the turtles again. The beaches were entirely made of motley-colored lava; their streaks of black, red, white, and gray looked picturesque. There were also waterspouts (tornado-like storms at sea). I'd see about six at a time in the distance—passing, approaching, receding, stretching from the clouds down to dingy white patches moving along the water. They looked like glassy, snaking, tapering smokestacks, like priestly creatures. I stared as they sucked up water in a mist of spray. They were lovely, sure, but they didn't provide companionship.
I frequently felt sorry for myself. I'd think: "Do I deserve this fate? I guess so, otherwise I wouldn't have ended up here. Did I choose this fate at some point? Not that I recall, but it's possible." Besides, where's the harm in self-pity? Perched as usual with my legs hanging over a volcano, I told myself that pity should start with oneself. So the sorrier I felt for myself, the more I felt like myself.
The setting sun dipped below the water. The same weird sun rose out of the water. Each of us was unique in that place. There was only one species of everything on the island. A single type of blue-purple, thin-shelled tree-snail crawled over everything—including the single species of tree, which was scrubby and dirty. The snail shells collected under the trees, and from far away, they looked for all the world like iris beds. There was one species of berry, which was crimson, and which I ate carefully—trying one berry at a time, with hours in between. It was slightly acidic, decent-tasting, and non-toxic, so I fermented it into liquor. I would drink that harsh, disgusting, bubbly brew (which got me drunk immediately); pipe the flute I'd made (it played the strangest notes ever); and with my head reeling, yell and dance around the goats. Aren't we all quirky do-it-yourself projects, like that flute? I was very fond of even the humblest thing I created on the island. Or not quite, since the humblest was a pathetic philosophy.
My knowledge was just too limited. Why wasn't I an expert in anything—ancient Greek theater, say, or the stars? My recollection of every book I'd read was patchy. As for poems, I tried to recite Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" to the iris-like snail shells, but couldn't remember what came after "the bliss." I looked it up almost as soon as I returned home.
The whole island smelled like goats and seagull droppings. Both the goats and seagulls were white, and seemed too docile—or maybe they assumed I was a goat or seagull. They were constantly bleating and shrieking: their noises are still ringing in my ears. The uncertain-sounding shrieks and baa's, the landscape of hissing rain and hissing, roaming turtles—all of it annoyed me. When the gulls rose in a flock, they sounded like a big wind in the leaves of a tall tree. I'd close my eyes and dream of a tree, like an oak that cast a deep patch of shade. I'd heard that island life could mess with the minds of cattle; I suspected it had messed with the minds of the goats. One of the goats, standing on the slopes of the volcano I called either Mont d'Espoir (French for "Mount Hope") or Mount Despair (I had plenty of time to make puns like that), would baa and baa, and smell the wind. I'd seize his chin hairs and stare at him. His pupils turned to horizontal slits, showing no emotion, or maybe some resentment. Even the colors on the island got boring! Once, I dyed a little goat berry-red, just for variety's sake, and his mom refused to acknowledge him.
The worst part of the island were the dreams I'd have. Obviously, some were about food and romance, and those were enjoyable. But I'd also have nightmares where, for instance, I'd accidentally cut a human baby's throat instead of a baby goat. I dreamed about islands multiplying endlessly into the distance, breeding other islands as if laying eggs that hatched into tadpoles. In those nightmares, I was doomed to inhabit each island for eons, recording its plants, animals, and terrain.
Just when I felt like I was about to lose my mind, the young man named Friday arrived. (Previous versions of my story have distorted this part completely.) Friday was a good man. He was a good man, and we were close. I wished he were female! I wanted to have kids, and I think he did, too, the poor guy. Sometimes he'd caress the little goats, run around with them, or cradle them. It was an attractive thing to see; he had a nice physique.
Then, suddenly, our rescuers came.
Now I'm back in England, which is also an island—one wouldn't think so, but who defines these things? My body and mind were obsessed with islands; they seemed to spawn islands. But the islands have died off now. I'm elderly, and life is boring: I drink normal tea in a home made of dull wood. That knife over on the shelf used to radiate significance, like a figure of Jesus on the cross. It seemed alive. For years, I used to plead with it to stay intact. I memorized every flaw in it, the blue-gray color of its blade, its chipped point, the pattern of its wooden handle. Now it seems to avoid my eyes. It looks dead and soulless. I glance at it, then glance away.
A museum around here has asked me to will them all my island possessions: flute, knife, shrunken shoes, goatskin pants (which are moth-eaten and falling apart), and the sun-umbrella that took so long to make, since I couldn't remember how to construct the ribs. It's still functional, but when it's closed up, it resembles a scrawny, featherless bird. Who would care about that kind of stuff? And this March, my beloved Friday, who died from a measles infection, will have been gone for seventeen years.
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“Crusoe in England” Themes
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Isolation, Displacement, and Connection
"Crusoe in England" is a dramatic monologue in the voice of Robinson Crusoe, the hero of Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel of the same name. Crusoe lives alone for many years as a castaway on a desert island, but the poem picks up after he has returned to England—that is, after his adventure is over. As Crusoe reflects on his island experience and what it all meant, he stresses not how physically grueling or frightening it was but how lonely it was. He recalls it as a deepening "nightmare[]" of isolation and boredom, interrupted only by the arrival of Friday, the young man who becomes his companion. Ultimately, the poem illustrates how even the most outwardly self-reliant person retains a deep need for human connection. Without such connection, even adventurous lives feel empty.
Though Crusoe faces physical hardships on his island, what really gets to him is the psychological hardship of loneliness. He gets terribly bored seeing the same scenery every day; he once dyes a goat red "Just to see something a little different." Rather than providing companionship, the island's animals just "g[et] on [his] nerves"; he's decidedly not "a goat" or a "gull" (despite what the animals seem to think), and this island isn't his natural habitat. His musings about feeling like a "giant" further convey how out of place he feels. Even the "Beautiful" sea storms are "not much company." There's no person to talk to on the island, no one to share the experience with.
The longer Crusoe is stranded, the more tormenting his loneliness becomes. He "dream[s] of [...] love" and has "nightmares of other islands [...] spawning" more islands, suggesting a fear of permanent isolation. He also confesses that he "often gave way to self-pity," or felt sorry for himself (a desperate way of simulating companionship, because it involves viewing his self almost as a separate person!). He has plenty of time to name things, count things, and appreciate his surroundings, but none of this feels satisfying without companionship.
Only the arrival of Friday—the spark of human connection—makes the island tolerable. This second man comes into Crusoe's life "Just when [Crusoe] thought [he] couldn't stand it / another minute longer." With great understatement, Crusoe reports that "Friday was nice, and we were friends." It's implied that they were also lovers, or at least that Crusoe was in love with him (attracted to his "pretty body"). Crusoe was about to go over the psychological edge without human company, but the bond between the two men is what makes the island, if not Crusoe's whole life, truly meaningful.
Crusoe ends the monologue by mourning Friday, who died in England "seventeen years ago come March." Though back in civilization, he now feels a different and perhaps greater loneliness than before. Indeed, he seems to be grieving the love of his life. He reports being "bored" and says that none of his island artifacts mean anything to him anymore (i.e., now that Friday is gone). These details reinforce the idea that connection is what gives life meaning; you don’t have to be stuck on an island to feel lonely.
The bond between Crusoe and Friday offers the key to understanding Crusoe's experience. Only human drama and companionship relieve the boredom and frustrations of the wilderness. This poem about desert-island adventure turns out to illustrate the necessity of human connection.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-182
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Subjectivity, Individuality, and Artistic Creation
While on the island, the hero of "Crusoe in England" makes or invents various items, from a parasol to "a miserable philosophy." He observes with a mix of pride and shame how crudely "home-made" these things seem—but adds that "we all" are home-made in a deeper sense. Read symbolically, this statement suggests creating things—from inventions to philosophies—is a lonely and private process, requiring ingenuity and self-reliance. Moreover, all creations reflect their makers' eccentricities; they always remain partly individual rather than universal. The same goes for how those creations are received: Crusoe questions the authority of any given judgement ("who decides" what's meaningful, good, etc.). He's aware that island solitude has distorted his own perspective, but he suggests that all individual, and even cultural, perspectives are relative. The poem stresses that, whether we're castaways or citizens of an empire, our viewpoints are subjective and limited; the meanings we make or find in the world are fragile, individual, and dependent on context.
The poem stresses both the ingenuity and eccentricity of Crusoe's creations. As a maker and thinker, he's talented but limited by his circumstances:
- He describes various products of what he calls his "island industries," including a knife, parasol, flute, pair of trousers, and home-brew liquor. He acknowledges that these creations are crude and odd. For example, his flute has "the weirdest scale on earth," and his berry liquor tastes "awful." Still, he feels "affection" for all he makes, suggesting that importance is a matter of perspective; on a lonely island, a flute with "the weirdest scale on earth" might count as fine entertainment.
- The one thing that bothers him is his "miserable philosophy," which is sharply limited by his lack of access to people and books. He's frustrated that he doesn't "know enough" to understand his world better and that his "philosophy" is limited by his lack of reading material. Yet he also implies that everything humans think or do is similarly limited—whether the source is an isolated castaway or an entire culture.
After calling his creations "home-made," Crusoe adds, "But aren't we all?" This rhetorical question suggests that every individual is isolated to some degree, at least within their own mind. More broadly, they're bounded by family, social groups, etc. Every artist, thinker, or maker thus inhabits a metaphorical "island" of some kind—indeed, so does every culture. (As Crusoe points out, all of England is literally an island.) Creating anything, therefore, figuratively begins at "home." The poem suggests that this pressure on the individual is part of the challenge; without it, art diminishes in interest and importance.
Crusoe's question "But aren't we all [home-made]?" further suggests that there's no comprehensive, official standard by which to measure our thoughts, judgements, and creations. As someone who's lived both on a desert isle and the bustling "island" of the UK, Crusoe observes how the significance of things can vary radically, depending on context:
- Crusoe's carefully wrought tools and clothes seem boring once he's back in civilization and he marvels that a local museum wants his old island implements.
- Back in England, an island "that doesn't seem like one," he also questions "who decides" what defines an island—a gesture toward the tenuous, subjective nature of judgement. Crusoe's larger point seems to be that there is no such thing as a truly objective, godlike perspective. Each individual and culture is its own bounded "island" in the grander scheme of things.
As a reworking of the original Robinson Crusoe, Bishop's poem seems especially applicable to artists, and can even be read as a sort of allegory of her own career:
- For example, Crusoe's interest in "poems," combined with a "philosophy" that seems inadequate to them, might comment on Bishop's own experience as a reader and writer. The "weird[] scale" of Crusoe's flute might symbolize her idiosyncratic artistry, and so on.
- Bishop could also be riffing on a remark by W. H. Auden, a poet she admired: "The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself." In other words, Bishop may be implying that all artists—not just free-verse poets—have to fend for themselves, even when working within a defined tradition. That's both their curse and their blessing.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-28
- Lines 55-64
- Lines 79-99
- Lines 115-120
- Lines 154-180
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Humanity and Nature
Like all versions of the Crusoe story, Bishop's pits a single person against the forces of nature. In Bishop's telling, however, the island wilderness is quite tame—almost "too tame." Crusoe finds his environment lonely and monotonous, if beautiful in some respects; in fact, it eats away at his sanity until a fellow human being (Friday) arrives. Overall, the poem conveys a sensitive, detailed knowledge of nature, but it's not a romantic or flattering portrayal. Rather than depicting a man in harmony with his environment, the poem imagines humanity as deeply alienated and unhappy in the wilderness.
Though Crusoe finds some beauty in his island, he is bored, unimpressed, and even repelled by it as a whole. He describes the island, unflatteringly, as "a sort of cloud-dump." It has "miserable, small volcanoes" that look like they have "their heads blown off" (perhaps an indirect hint of his own suicidal depression and boredom). The island's animals wear on his "nerves"; he finds their sounds maddening, even when remembering them all these years later. He repeatedly distances himself from the animals, pointing out that he's not a goat or a gull despite what they might think. Meanwhile, the weather disheartens him even when it's pleasant or exotic: he calls the distant waterspouts (tornado-like sea storms) "Beautiful, yes, but not much company."
He's starved not only for company but for variety, as the island has "only one kind of everything." He seems to find even the basic cycles of nature, such as sunrise and sunset, exasperatingly repetitive. All in all, the poem presents Crusoe as utterly out of place in nature; his nightmare involves having to “register[]” the flora, fauna, and geography of endless islands.
Notably, even before Friday arrives, his only true pleasures on the island are human pleasures. He takes a sad kind of pleasure in "self-pity," for example, and drinks home-brew liquor (a very human activity) to get outside his own head for a while. Unlike the flora and fauna, the tools he makes seem to have a "living soul"—he even talks to his knife! These objects are laden with "meaning" because they are props in a human drama, products of human hope and struggle. For the speaker, then, the only deep interest nature holds is human interest: the drama of human ingenuity, bonding, and survival in the wilderness.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-182
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Love, Grief, and Guilt
"Crusoe in England" explores the close bond between Crusoe and Friday, who joins him on the island midway through his exile. In Bishop's telling, their story is a kind of romance, though Crusoe doesn't explicitly describe it as such. It's also a tragic tale, since by the time Crusoe narrates the poem, his "dear Friday" has "died of measles / seventeen years ago come March." Indeed, the poem can be read as a symbolic statement about losing one's dearest friend or the love of one's life. This experience can feel, Bishop suggests, like losing one's only companion on a desert island: life afterward feels anticlimatic, hollow, and tinged with survivor's guilt.
Though Crusoe leaves many details unspoken, he implies that his bond with Friday is romantic. Crusoe claims that "Accounts of that have everything all wrong," implying that previous versions of his story have misunderstood or distorted his relationship with Friday. Crusoe's description of their meeting is a mix of joyous relief (Friday arrives "Just when I thought I couldn't stand it / another minute longer"), bashful understatement ("Friday was nice, and we were friends"), and homoeroticism ("Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body").
Crusoe laments, "If only he had been a woman!" and suggests that both he and Friday would have liked to meet and have children with a female partner. Yet he expresses attraction to Friday and hints that their desires, whatever they might have been otherwise, turned toward each other on the island. Their exact relationship is left to the imagination, but it's noticeably different than in Defoe's original, colonialist "Account[]," in which Crusoe makes Friday his servant, converts him to Christianity, etc. Bishop frames the story in simpler and more equal terms, as one of two men rescuing each other from loneliness.
By the end, however, this story of love and friendship turns to one of grief and implied guilt. Crusoe ends his monologue by abruptly reporting: "—And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles / seventeen years ago come March." This detail breaks in seemingly out of nowhere, as if it's been in the back of Crusoe's mind the whole time and perhaps even motivated him to tell the story at all. It's clear that the loss of his companion still weighs on him after seventeen long years.
Even more tragically, it's implied that Crusoe, or at least the return to England, partly caused Friday's death. The Crusoe story (which dates from 1719) takes place in an age when many indigenous Americans had not yet been exposed to measles, and could easily die if infected. Friday's death, then, results from his bond with Crusoe (who encounters Europeans when "they came and took us off" the island, and who apparently accompanied Crusoe back to England, as in the novel).
Bishop uses the Crusoe story, then, as a kind of allegory for profound love and loss. Meeting and losing someone you love, the poem suggests, feels like suddenly gaining a friend on a desert island—then finding yourself alone again, feeling partly responsible for your own loneliness.
Bishop finished "Crusoe in England" after losing her longtime partner, the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, who died by suicide after Bishop moved back to the U.S. from Brazil. The poem is sometimes read as channeling her grief and guilt over that tragedy.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 129-131
- Lines 142-153
- Lines 181-182
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Procreation and Legacy
"Crusoe in England" is full of imagery related to procreation, although (or perhaps because) it's a desert-island tale about two isolated men. Crusoe notes that both he and Friday wanted to have children but were unable to do so in their island solitude. He's also plagued by nightmares about babies, breeding, and barrenness. As the meditation of an elderly man, the poem seems to weigh the joys in Crusoe's life (Friday, his inventions, etc.) against his regrets, and to suggest that he wasn't able to have everything he might have desired. Read as an allegory about love and art, the poem might illustrate how a nontraditional romantic or creative life can come at the cost of a traditional family life.
Crusoe's monologue conveys anxiety and wistfulness regarding procreation and children:
- For example, he has nightmares about "slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it / for a baby goat." Together with later details, this nightmare might hint at a fear that, in his solitude, he's wasting his potential—metaphorically killing off the babies he could have. Or it might hint at secret fears surrounding parenthood itself.
- He also has nightmares of "islands spawning islands, / like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs / of islands." The language here (spawning, eggs) is ironic, since what he's describing is really the multiplication of barrenness or loneliness. (These imagined islands have "flora" and "fauna," but they seem empty of humans, just as his own island is.)
- On meeting Friday, he confesses, "I wanted to propagate my kind, / and so did he, I think, poor boy." But of course, having children is impossible for two men stranded on a desert island. Crusoe fondly recalls how Friday would "pet the baby goats" and play with them: another possible sign of both men's yearning to father babies of their own.
Now that he's grown too old to start a family, Crusoe ponders his legacy and seems to doubt whether his life was as fruitful and satisfying as it might have been. He reiterates that "my brain / bred islands," but adds that this process has "petered out" because he's "old." In his declining years, he feels he has lost even his imaginative fertility (so there's the suggestion that his sexual fertility is gone as well).
His anxiety around children and childlessness, though not directly invoked at the end, heightens the bittersweet mood as Crusoe contemplates what his life did and didn't offer. Looking back over the past, he implies that his adventures and inventions—which once felt deeply meaningful—no longer fully satisfy him. Along with his loss of Friday, his lack of other family seems to compound his loneliness and "bored[om]" in old age.
At the same time, he seems to have avoided fatherhood for all the years after Friday died, so maybe it wasn't just the island (or his romance with Friday) that stopped him from having kids. He may have felt a complex mix of attraction and aversion toward parenthood, with aversion winning out in the end. Ultimately, the act of writing (the monologue itself) becomes a way of "propagat[ing]" the Crusoe-Friday story. Writing leaves its own kind of legacy, even if it's not the kind Crusoe once dreamed about.
Again, this theme may have had some resonance in Bishop's own life. A lesbian in an era when queerness was heavily stigmatized, and queer couples were largely unable to become adoptive parents, Bishop wanted kids but remained childless like Crusoe. Through the persona of Crusoe, the poet may be contemplating her own creative and romantic life, the traditional family life she never had, and the legacy she'll leave behind.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 125-182
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Crusoe in England”
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Lines 1-7
A new volcano ...
... like a fly.As the title suggests, the speaker of "Crusoe in England" is the castaway Robinson Crusoe, from Daniel Defoe's famous 1719 novel of the same title. In other words, this poem is a dramatic monologue: it's spoken in the voice of a character who is not the poet. It's also a very loose adaptation of its source material: Bishop changes Crusoe's character, setting, and story in many key respects. The poem's opening lines start to establish her Crusoe: the original spin she will bring to this classic tale.
The title also makes clear that Crusoe is narrating this poem from back home "in England." In other words, he's no longer trapped on a desert island. He's re-immersed in civilization, even plugged in to the media landscape. In fact, he begins by mentioning some news he's recently read in "the papers." This news turns out to relate to his former island—which, in Bishop's version of the story, was volcanic.
First, Crusoe reports that "A new volcano has erupted" somewhere in the world. Then, he recounts that "last week I was reading / where some ship saw an island being born." Evidently, this island was "born" from a separate, undersea volcanic eruption. (Islands formed in this way are known as high islands or volcanic islands.) Crusoe describes what the ship's crew witnessed: "first a breath of steam, ten miles away," followed by the appearance of a "black fleck," likely made of the volcanic rock called "basalt." (Basalt forms from cooling and hardening lava.) This fleck looked as small as a "fly" through the "binoculars" of the ship's "mate" (second-in-command) and seemed to catch "on the horizon" as if sticking to flypaper.
This striking imagery—including the vivid "fly" simile—immediately puts Crusoe's whole adventure into a broad perspective. As someone who lived on a volcanic island for many years, it's natural that Crusoe should follow news about volcanoes and islands. But what these "new" events seem to signify, on a symbolic level, is that the world has moved on from his ordeal. The metaphorical birth of the volcanic island is like the birth of a younger generation: a reminder of time's passage.
Moreover, the new island looks as puny as a fly from just ten miles' distance. This perspective suggests that Crusoe's great adventure—the whole drama he lived out on his island—might also be puny and trivial in the grander scheme of things. And the same might be true of anyone's solitary struggle, or anyone's whole existence. (Notice how the word "born" sets up an implied analogy between an island and an individual life.)
Before diving into his own tale, then, Crusoe seems to suggest that it's not really all that special. Islands come and go—and so do human struggles like his. On the geological timescale of the earth, these events are as ordinary and minuscule as the birth and death of flies.
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Lines 8-10
They named it. ...
... got it right.
Unlock all 446 words of this analysis of Lines 8-10 of “Crusoe in England,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Lines 11-17
Well, I had ...
... heads blown off. -
Lines 18-24
I'd think that ...
... or the gulls, -
Lines 24-28
or the overlapping ...
... was mostly overcast. -
Lines 29-35
My island seemed ...
... whole place hissed? -
Lines 36-42
The turtles lumbered ...
... be more turtles. -
Lines 43-50
The beaches were ...
... of scuffed-up white. -
Lines 51-54
Glass chimneys, flexible, ...
... not much company. -
Lines 55-59
I often gave ...
... could have been." -
Lines 60-64
What's wrong about ...
... felt at home. -
Lines 65-72
The sun set ...
... sooty, scrub affair. -
Lines 73-79
Snail shells lay ...
... I made home-brew. -
Lines 79-85
I'd drink ...
... aren't we all? -
Lines 86-92
I felt a ...
... drama or astronomy? -
Lines 92-99
The books ...
... look it up. -
Lines 100-106
The island smelled ...
... they're hurting now. -
Lines 107-114
The questioning shrieks, ...
... real shade, somewhere. -
Lines 115-120
I'd heard of ...
... sniff the air. -
Lines 121-128
I'd grab his ...
... wouldn't recognize him. -
Lines 129-135
Dreams were the ...
... away from mine, -
Lines 135-141
infinities ...
... fauna, their geography. -
Lines 142-146
Just when I ...
... we were friends. -
Lines 147-152
If only he ...
... a pretty body. -
Lines 153-158
And then one ...
... out. I'm old. -
Lines 159-164
I'm bored, too, ...
... not to break? -
Lines 165-170
I knew each ...
... and pass on. -
Lines 171-175
The local museum's ...
... in the fur), -
Lines 176-180
the parasol that ...
... want such things? -
Lines 181-182
—And Friday, my ...
... ago come March.
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“Crusoe in England” Symbols
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Islands
Islands are symbolically linked with isolation and loneliness, and this poem draws heavily on those associations. In castaway stories like Crusoe's, island life is also associated with self-reliance and individuality. In Bishop's version of the story, the desert island even seems to represent Crusoe's private, subjective world—which resembles the private world of the writer. The island is where Crusoe makes and invents things, where he gives names to things (as some poets do, for example, and as Adam does in the Garden of Eden), and where he tries to assemble a "philosophy" from both his experience and the "books" he's read. But it's also where he longs for love and escape.
The poem is actually set on two different islands: the island where Crusoe was stranded, and the island of Great Britain, where he returns after he's rescued. Crusoe also mentions an island that was recently "born" from a volcanic eruption, a phenomenon he reads about in the newspaper. Then there are the islands Crusoe has "nightmares" about: "infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands."
This proliferation of islands seems to symbolize Crusoe's deepening loneliness. Throughout his life, he simply moves from island to island—from one kind of boredom and isolation to another—to the point where he can only imagine islands (i.e., further loneliness). Worse, the islands he imagines are desert islands, symbols of a barrenness that carries over into his family life. (He "want[s] to propagate [his] kind"—have children—but never does.)
In short, while his "brain" is creatively fertile, his creativity never relieves his isolation. It only "br[eeds] islands," or further traps him within the limits of his individual worldview. Meanwhile, his literal fertility goes to waste; he grows "old" without fathering kids who might keep him company.
The English poet John Donne famously wrote that "No man is an island," meaning that no one is truly alone in the world. The symbolism of "Crusoe in England" suggests otherwise! It depicts isolation—island-ness—as a kind of default state. Whether this is supposed to be the default state of humanity, or just artistic and individualist types (like the poet herself), is open to interpretation.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 3: “where some ship saw an island being born:”
- Lines 5-9: “and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— / rose in the mate's binoculars / and caught on the horizon like a fly. / They named it. But my poor old island's still / un-rediscovered, un-renamable.”
- Lines 29-30: “My island seemed to be / a sort of cloud-dump.”
- Line 68: “The island had one kind of everything:”
- Lines 86-87: “I felt a deep affection for / the smallest of my island industries.”
- Line 100: “The island smelled of goat and guano.”
- Lines 115-116: “I'd heard of cattle getting island-sick. / I thought the goats were.”
- Lines 133-141: “I'd have / nightmares of other islands / stretching away from mine, infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands, / like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs / of islands, knowing that I had to live / on each and every one, eventually, / for ages, registering their flora, / their fauna, their geography.”
- Lines 154-158: “Now I live here, another island, / that doesn't seem like one, but who decides? / My blood was full of them; my brain / bred islands. But that archipelago / has petered out. I'm old.”
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Volcanoes/Craters
Volcanoes are traditional symbols of emotional volatility—they're quiet for long periods, then they erupt! They combine heights (they're a kind of mountain) and depths (craters). The volcanoes in "Crusoe in England" also represent a paradoxical combination of creative power and sterility. In fact, Crusoe links them with both birth and death.
On the one hand, the poem's volcanoes are a disruptive, even violent creative force: in the first stanza, an island is "born" from a volcanic eruption. On the other hand, it's a desert island, just like Crusoe's. The volcano's creative power, ironically, produces a kind of barrenness. Meanwhile, the volcanoes on Crusoe's island—which may originally have created his island—are now "dead" and look as though they have "their heads blown off" (lines 14 and 17). Even when they seem to spew hissing lava, it's an illusion: the noise is really coming from the island's turtles (lines 40-42).
If the volcanoes seem to represent both creativity and sterility (or creation and destruction), they also represent, in Crusoe's mind, both hope and despair. Presumably, that's why he names one of them Mont d'Espoir (French for "Mount Hope") and Mount Despair. The bilingual pun captures twin facets of his own situation. He hopes to be rescued from solitude, and may even watch for ships from higher ground, but he fears that rescue will never come. Although he "climb[s]" the volcanoes—invoking traditional notions of mountain-climbing as an optimistic, ambitious pursuit—he acknowledges that they're absurdly easy to scale. And what waits at the top is not a peak but a crater: a pit that seems to represent the depths of depression and "self-pity" (lines 55-64).
There's a tradition in American poetry of associating volcanoes with creative power, and female creative power in particular. Emily Dickinson compares herself to the volcano "Vesuvius" in multiple poems, including one whose language (references to "Geography," "Home," etc.) contains striking similarities to Bishop's:
Volcanoes be in Sicily
And South America
I judge from my Geography
Volcanoes nearer here
A Lava step at any time
Am I inclined to climb
A Crater I may contemplate
Vesuvius at HomeThe poet Adrienne Rich published her landmark feminist essay on Dickinson, "Vesuvius at Home" (1975), a year before Bishop published "Crusoe in England" in Geography III. Rich's essay elaborates on Dickinson's metaphor, linking the volcano with elemental, dangerous female power. Whether or not Bishop, as an American woman and poet, was alluding to these works, "Crusoe in England" taps into similar ideas. Crusoe's references to volcanoes channel his anxiety about fertility and barrenness (both creative and reproductive), as well as his experience of emotional highs and lows.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-7: “A new volcano has erupted, / the papers say, and last week I was reading / where some ship saw an island being born: / at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; / and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— / rose in the mate's binoculars / and caught on the horizon like a fly.”
- Lines 11-20: “Well, I had fifty-two / miserable, small volcanoes I could climb / with a few slithery strides— / volcanoes dead as ash heaps. / I used to sit on the edge of the highest one / and count the others standing up, / naked and leaden, with their heads blown off. / I'd think that if they were the size / I thought volcanoes should be, then I had / become a giant;”
- Lines 30-33: “All the hemisphere's / left-over clouds arrived and hung / above the craters—their parched throats / were hot to touch.”
- Lines 40-41: “The folds of lava, running out to sea, / would hiss.”
- Lines 43-45: “The beaches were all lava, variegated, / black, red, and white, and gray; / the marbled colors made a fine display.”
- Lines 61-63: “With my legs dangling down familiarly / over a crater's edge, I told myself / "Pity should begin at home."”
- Lines 117-119: “One billy-goat would stand on the volcano / I'd christened / Mont d'Espoir / or / Mount Despair / (I'd time enough to play with names),”
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Goats
Goats take on a complex symbolism over the course of the poem. Until Friday arrives, they seem to be the only mammals on the island (apart from Crusoe himself). They're also animals that humans frequently keep as livestock. (The original Robinson Crusoe was based partly on the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk, a castaway on an island inhabited by feral goats—which were descended from tame goats left behind by previous sailors.) For these reasons, they provide a symbolic link between humanity and nature, or civilization and the wilderness.
In fact, Crusoe considers the island's goats (and gulls) "too tame"—eerily docile in the presence of humans. He speculates that they might think he is "a goat, too, or a gull." He seems to lose part of his humanity in their presence, or, rather, recognize how little divides the categories human and natural, tame and wild, etc. The goats even mimic the behavior of domestic animals, and of Crusoe himself. They seem to get "island-sick," the way "cattle" do, and one cries out from the slopes of a volcano that Crusoe has named "Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair." In other words, the goats unnervingly reflect Crusoe's own kind of "island-sick[ness]": his loneliness, despondency, etc. And that reflection might not be purely symbolic: if the goats aren't native to this island, they may feel as displaced and miserable there as he does. (Both goats and Crusoe like to climb the volcanoes and gaze out to sea, as if searching for some sign of rescue.)
At the same time, the goats aren't human enough to offer any real company. When Crusoe looks at one directly, its eyes "express[] nothing, or a little malice" as opposed to intelligence or love. Once again, these animals blur categories: they are neither truly wild nor truly human.
Though it never appears in the poem, the standard word for baby goats is "kids"—a word also applied to human children. Perhaps for this reason, the poem symbolically links goat kids with human kids. Crusoe has nightmares of "slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it / for a baby goat," and he connects his desire for parenthood with memories of Friday petting baby goats. In each case, the goats are presented as almost human, but not quite. Crusoe seems to feel a kind of murderer's remorse at the violence he's done to the animals (to make his "goatskin trousers," for example), while Friday lavishes parental affection on them. They're not as satisfying to either man as a baby of their own would be, but they come tantalizingly close.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 100-106: “The island smelled of goat and guano. / The goats were white, so were the gulls, / and both too tame, or else they thought / I was a goat, too, or a gull. / Baa, baa, baa / and / shriek, shriek, shriek, / baa... shriek... / baa / ... / I still can't shake / them from my ears; they're hurting now.”
- Lines 115-128: “I'd heard of cattle getting island-sick. / I thought the goats were. / One billy-goat would stand on the volcano / I'd christened / Mont d'Espoir / or / Mount Despair / (I'd time enough to play with names), / and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air. / I'd grab his beard and look at him. / His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up / and expressed nothing, or a little malice. / I got so tired of the very colors! / One day I dyed a baby goat bright red / with my red berries, just to see / something a little different. / And then his mother wouldn't recognize him.”
- Lines 131-133: “But then I'd dream of things / like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it / for a baby goat.”
- Lines 150-151: “He'd pet the baby goats sometimes, / and race with them, or carry one around.”
- Lines 174-175: “my shedding goatskin trousers / (moths have got in the fur),”
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The Knife
Crusoe himself remarks on the symbolic power of his knife. While he lived on the island, "it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix" (a figure of Jesus on the cross). He would "beg it, implore it, not to break," because he needed it so badly. But now that he's safely back in civilization, it seems meaningless; its "living soul" is gone.
The knife is first and foremost a symbol of survival—including the violence that wilderness survival entails. (It's implied, for example, that Crusoe uses his knife to kill goats for their meat and fur.) Just as Christians trust in and pray to Jesus for the eternal life of their souls, Crusoe depended on—and, in a sense, prayed to—the knife for the survival of his body.
The knife could also be read as a phallic symbol, an emblem of Crusoe's sexual and creative vitality. Crusoe stresses how intimately familiar he was with the knife while he needed it, how he begged it not to "break" and let him down, etc. Now that he's old, its vitality is gone: its tip is "broken," and its "living soul has dribbled away." He groups it together with his (also unused, phallic-shaped) "flute" and "shrivelled shoes." All of this language carries connotations related to male potency and impotence. The once-vital, now-useless knife seems to reflect Crusoe's sense that his best years are behind him: his love life and creative life are over, and he has no children to carry on his legacy.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 161-170: “The knife there on the shelf— / it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. / It lived. How many years did I / beg it, implore it, not to break? / I knew each nick and scratch by heart, / the bluish blade, the broken tip, / the lines of wood-grain on the handle... / Now it won't look at me at all. / The living soul has dribbled away. / My eyes rest on it and pass on.”
- Lines 171-173: “The local museum's asked me to / leave everything to them: / the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,”
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The Flute
Crusoe's flute is a symbol of art and creativity. As a "home-made" instrument with possibly "the weirdest scale on earth," it also seems to represent his individuality, eccentricity, and outsider status. If the poem is read as an allegory about the creative/artistic life, Crusoe's music represents the kind of art that's made at the social margins, outside of official traditions and institutions. Its "weird[ness]" could be seen as a source of strength rather than weakness.
In Greek myth, the pan flute or panpipes is associated with Pan, the god of nature, shepherds, and flocks. In appearance, he is part man, part goat; in other words, he straddles the borderline between the human and the natural. Between his flute and his adopted flock of goats, Crusoe is a very Pan-like figure himself. In the English poetic tradition, panpipes also famously appear in John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which they're associated with poetry, art, and loneliness all at once:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, [...]Once Crusoe is back in England, he contemplates leaving his flute to "The local museum[]," along with other discarded possessions: a broken knife, a folded parasol, "shrivelled shoes," etc. All of these objects might be read as sad phallic symbols, hints of the elderly hero's waning potency—or his loss of interest in romance and art after the death of Friday. The fact that Crusoe no longer plays his flute might suggest that his creative life, along with his love life, is a thing of the past.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 82-84: “and play my home-made flute / (I think it had the weirdest scale on earth) / and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.”
- Lines 171-173: “The local museum's asked me to / leave everything to them: / the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,”
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“Crusoe in England” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
Over the course of the monologue, Crusoe uses a number of metaphors and similes to illustrate his desert island experience. For example, he compares his island to "a sort of cloud-dump" and its volcanic craters to "parched throats" that were "hot to touch." These comparisons make it clear that Crusoe has not found an island paradise: the weather's bad, and the landscape is dry, hot, and dangerous.
Elsewhere, metaphor conjures up exotic sights and natural phenomena, such as the "waterspouts" Crusoe witnesses at sea: "Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated, / sacerdotal beings of glass." Readers who have never seen a waterspout (a tornado-like sea-storm) can probably picture a flexible glass chimney and have some idea of what Crusoe is describing. The second metaphor, "sacerdotal beings," compares the waterspouts to priestly figures. This may be because they are:
- tall and imposing
- quiet when witnessed from "far out"
- connected to the heavens (they have "their heads in cloud"
- made of water, which is symbolically linked with purity and holiness
Or all of the above!
Crusoe's figurative language also demonstrates his vivid imagination; he is, after all, a writer of sorts, one who's interested in "poems" and "philosophy." For example, he observes that the island's "Snail shells" visually resemble "beds of irises." Later, he converts this observation into a metaphor: "I tried / reciting to my iris-beds." His imagination seems to have changed one thing into another, transformed shells into flowers—and personified them as a conscious audience. He's even reciting them a poem about flowers! Maybe island solitude is playing tricks with his mind. Or to put it another way: maybe Bishop is implying that eccentric, "poetic" thinking is a product of extreme solitude.
Later, metaphors and similes illustrate Crusoe's growing fixation on islands—which, in turn, illustrates his deepening isolation. At night, he dreams of "islands spawning islands, / like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs / of islands." Even in waking life, a whole cluster ("archipelago") of islands seems to swim in his "blood" and spring forth from his "brain." While these descriptions also attest to the vividness of Crusoe's imagination, they suggest that, after a certain point, he can imagine only more loneliness—only variations on his current solitude.
Where metaphor appears in the poem:- Line 3: “where some ship saw an island being born:”
- Line 7: “and caught on the horizon like a fly.”
- Line 14: “volcanoes dead as ash heaps.”
- Line 17: “naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.”
- Lines 29-30: “My island seemed to be / a sort of cloud-dump.”
- Lines 32-33: “the craters—their parched throats / were hot to touch.”
- Line 37: “hissing like teakettles.”
- Lines 49-50: “their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches / of scuffed-up white.”
- Lines 51-52: “Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated, / sacerdotal beings of glass...”
- Lines 52-53: “I watched / the water spiral up in them like smoke.”
- Lines 94-95: “well, I tried / reciting to my iris-beds,”
- Lines 111-112: “When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded / like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.”
- Lines 136-138: “islands spawning islands, / like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs / of islands,”
- Lines 156-158: “My blood was full of them; my brain / bred islands. But that archipelago / has petered out.”
- Lines 161-162: “The knife there on the shelf— / it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.”
- Line 169: “The living soul has dribbled away.”
- Lines 178-179: “It still will work but, folded up, / looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.”
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Personification
Unlock all 209 words of this analysis of Personification in “Crusoe in England,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Juxtaposition
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Repetition
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Rhetorical Question
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Irony
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Allusion
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“Crusoe in England” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Basalt
- Mate's
- Leaden
- Hexagon
- Rollers
- Cloud-dump
- Hemisphere's
- Variegated
- Marbled
- Waterspouts
- Attenuated
- Sacerdotal
- Familiarly
- Scrub
- Sub-acid
- Home-brew
- Scale
- Inward eye
- Guano
- Equivocal
- Ambulating
- Island-sick
- Mont d'Espoir
- Malice
- Polliwogs
- Registering
- Flora, Fauna
- Propagate
- Archipelago
- Crucifix
- Implore
- Parasol
Basalt-
(Location in poem: Line 5: “and then a black fleck—basalt, probably—”)
An igneous volcanic rock, formed from cooling lava.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Crusoe in England”
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Form
"Crusoe in England" contains 12 stanzas, which vary wildly in length—from a single line to 29 lines. There is no enjambment across stanzas, and the arrangement of stanzas is mostly paratactic: there are few transitional phrases (e.g., "Because" or "And then" in lines 90 and 153) linking one stanza logically to the next. As a result, the stanzas in this poem about islands resemble idiosyncratic islands unto themselves.
The poem is written in free verse, although it contains a high proportion of iambic pentameter lines (lines that follow a five-beat, da-DUM, da-DUM rhythm). It sprinkles in a small handful of rhymes, for musical color or emphasis, but is mostly unrhymed. In general, the poem takes a unique, unpredictable form that seems to reflect life on Crusoe's island, where he's a solitary man living spontaneously in nature. (The poet W. H. Auden once compared the writer of free verse to "Crusoe on his desert island," figuring out everything for himself rather than working from existing patterns. Bishop greatly admired Auden, so it's possible that she had that quote in mind when shaping her poem.)
In terms of genre, the poem is a dramatic monologue, meaning that it's voiced by a character separate from the poet. In fact, it adopts the voice of an established literary character: the castaway hero of Daniel Defoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). Though the poem preserves elements from the original story, Bishop makes the Crusoe character her own, turning him into a modern-sounding, dryly understated, quietly grieving figure.
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Meter
The poem is written in free verse, meaning that it doesn't follow a consistent meter. However, it contains a great deal of iambic pentameter: lines of five iambs, poetic feet that follow a da-DUM rhythm. For example, eight out of the first ten lines (lines 2-5 and 7-10) are either perfect or near-perfect iambic pentameter:
the pa- | pers say, | and last | week I | was reading
where some | ship saw | an i- | sland be- | ing born:
at first | a breath | of steam, | ten miles | away;
and then | a black | fleck—ba- | salt, prob- | ably—
[...]
and caught | on the | hori- | zon like | a fly.
They named | it. But | my poor | old i- | sland's still
un-re | discov- | ered, un- | rena- | mable.
None of | the books | has ev- | er got | it right.Meanwhile, lines 1 and 6 are shorter than ten syllables, so they don't fit the pattern. In general, the poem keeps discarding and resuming iambic pentameter at irregular intervals. While this first stanza uses it heavily, for example, the next stanza uses it sparsely, and some long passages (e.g., lines 93-106) contain no iambic pentameter whatsoever.
In English-language poetry, free verse became widespread during the 20th-century modernist movement; previously, poets wrote almost entirely in meter. Meanwhile, iambic pentameter is the most common and traditional English meter of all. This combination of the traditional and modern seems to fit a poem that's a 20th-century take on an 18th-century classic (Robinson Crusoe). The poem's quirky rhythms might also reflect the quirks of life on Crusoe's island, including the "home-made," idiosyncratic nature of the objects Crusoe makes.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem is written in free verse and has no rhyme scheme, though it does contain stray end rhymes here and there. Examples include "touch"/"much" in lines 33-34, "gray"/"display" in lines 44-45, "sea"/"me" in lines 66-67, "Despair"/"air" (lines 118 and 120), and "eventually"/"geography" (lines 139 and 140).
These rhymes add a little extra musicality to the poem's language while highlighting a few key images and thematically important words. For example, the "sea"/"me" rhyme (which occurs in a passage about repetition) highlights the monotony of Crusoe's existence: it's just him, the sea, and the island, day after day. Likewise, the rhyme on "Despair" gently underscores Crusoe's mounting sense of hopelessness. "Geography" (which completes a subtle rhyme and ends its stanza) is a crucial word not only in the poem but in the collection it comes from: Bishop's Geography III. Both the poem and the book explore the difficulty of orienting oneself—metaphorically, mapping one's place—in an often lonely, confusing, hostile world.
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“Crusoe in England” Speaker
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"Crusoe in England" is a dramatic monologue voiced by Robinson Crusoe, the narrator of Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Or at least, the speaker is a version of Defoe's narrator. Bishop adapts her source material very freely, preserving some elements, discarding others, and adding many original touches of her own.
The full title of the original novel provides more context: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With: An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. (Titles in the 18th century were often on the longer side, and their subtitles could provide character detail, plot summary, etc.) Bishop preserves the broad outlines of this story: her Crusoe is also a shipwrecked English mariner who lives alone for many years on a deserted island, possibly off the coast of South America (the location of the "Oroonoque," or Oronoque River). Yet she cuts or condenses much of Defoe's plot, including the rescue by pirates (reduced to a single line: "And then one day they came and took us off"). Her narrative focuses, ultimately, on the love between Crusoe and his "dear Friday."
Compared with the original character, then, Bishop's Crusoe speaks less to how he survived on the island and more to how he felt there. (Also, how he felt after returning to England, "another island.") He discusses, for example, his bouts of "self-pity," his pride in his "island industries," his terrifying "nightmares," and his desire for children, while delicately conveying his attraction to Friday.
Defoe's novel certainly explores loneliness and melancholy, and his depiction of the Crusoe-Friday relationship contains homoerotic elements. But Defoe's protagonist is essentially an English colonizer who converts Friday, a member of a nearby mainland tribe, to Christianity—and makes him his servant as well as his companion. By contrast, Bishop drops the colonialist material, obscures the details of how Crusoe and Friday met, and places the two men on pretty much equal terms (apart from their age gap). As a result, Crusoe's monologue becomes less a survival story than a tragic love story: a tale of deep loneliness followed by joyous connection, untimely loss, and grief.
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“Crusoe in England” Setting
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The poem has two main settings: the island where Crusoe was shipwrecked and stranded for many years, and the country of the title, "England," where Crusoe returns after his adventure.
The desert island in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe lies off "the coast of America," somewhere "near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque." In other words, it's off the coast of South America, near a river that originates on the Guyana-Brazil border and flows into the Caribbean. Bishop's Crusoe, on the other hand, suggests that his "poor old island's" whereabouts are indeterminate: the place is not only unnamed but "un-rediscovered, un-renamable."
Crusoe spends much of the poem describing the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the island, which seems to be tropical but can't be pinned down to any one location. Critics have found many possible inspirations for the island's "flora," "fauna," "geography," and weather, from the Galápagos as described by Charles Darwin to Bishop's impressions of her vacations to Aruba. Bishop's version of Crusoe's island is a vivid but imaginary place, constructed from literary precedents as well as real-life observations. It's small, sparse, and severely lacking in variety: it seems to contain only "one kind of everything," from snails to berries.
As for England, Crusoe describes it as "another island, / that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?" After his exotic exile, Crusoe's home country strikes him as "bor[ing]"; its "real tea" and "uninteresting lumber" excite him far less than the food, drink, and raw materials he had to forage for himself. Evidently, he misses the challenge of survival in the wilderness. Yet the desert island often bored him, too: in both places, it's the presence and love of Friday that really engages him.
The "local museum" in England wants to preserve his island clothes and implements, but Crusoe can't understand why "such things" would hold meaning for anyone else. This detail conveys how personal "my poor old island[]" feels to Crusoe (especially compared with his crowded, impersonal home country). His place of exile becomes a theater for his private drama of survival, creativity, and love. It even mirrors his own psyche: he associates the island's volcanic "crater[s]," for example, with his depths of self-pity and despair.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Crusoe in England”
Literary Context
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was a celebrated American poet, as well as a short story writer, painter, and translator. "Crusoe in England" appears in her final collection, Geography III (1976), which also features such famous poems as "One Art," "The Moose," and "In the Waiting Room." At 182 lines, "Crusoe" is the longest poem of her career, as well as one of the few poems she based explicitly on an existing work of literature. Its source is one of the earliest novels in English literature, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is credited with launching the genre of the "castaway narrative" or desert island story.
Bishop created visual art throughout her life and kept multimedia journals. Her work is sometimes described as imagistic; she tends to observe the physical world closely and encode her conclusions in minute descriptive details, often while exploring themes of loss, belonging, and yearning.
Bishop's career also overlapped with the literary movement called Confessionalism. Confessional poets—who included Bishop's peers Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, as well as her longtime friend Robert Lowell—emphasized the autobiographical in their poetry, often highlighting intense emotional and psychological experiences. Bishop, however, was critical of this mode of writing and resisted including such detailed or direct personal accounts in her poems. Though her poems draw on her life, they often do so with a degree of distance and convey their feeling in indirect or ironic ways. "Crusoe in England," for instance, adopts the voice of a famous literary character, Robinson Crusoe, but uses the dramatic monologue form to express facets of Bishop's own experience.
Bishop traveled a great deal throughout her life (including to the island of Aruba, which inspired some of her descriptions in this poem). She was also a gay woman writer in the male-dominated 20th-century literary world, and many of her poems explore the experience of being an outsider—or loner—in a faraway or unfamiliar place. Some scholars have argued that "Crusoe in England" fits this pattern, and in particular, that it reflects the 15 years she spent in Brazil with her partner Lota de Macedo Soares (1910-1967). Soares, a Brazilian architect and designer, took her own life in 1967, about nine years before the poem's publication. Scholars have pointed to parallel elements in Crusoe's and Bishop's experiences: for example, living in or around South America as a transplant from the Northern Hemisphere, feeling lost and isolated before finding love, then losing and mourning one's longtime partner. In other words, they have suggested that Crusoe's grief for his "dear Friday" indirectly channels Bishop's grief for Soares.
After the poem was published, Bishop discussed it in an interview with the poet George Starbuck, and revealed that she wasn't actually a Defoe fan:
GS: What got the Crusoe poem started?
EB: I don't know. I reread the book and discovered how really awful Robinson Crusoe was, which I hadn't realized. I hadn't read it in a long time. And then I was remembering a long-ago visit to Aruba—long before it was a big developed "resort." I took a trip across the island, and it's true that there are small volcanoes all over the place.
GS: I forget the end of Robinson Crusoe. Does the poem converge on the book?
EB: No. I've forgotten the facts there, exactly. I reread it all one night. And I had forgotten it was so moral. All that Christianity. So I think I wanted to re-see it with all that left out.
Historical Context
After growing up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and the northeastern United States, Bishop traveled extensively throughout southern Europe and northern Africa, recording many of her observations in verse. Intending to take a short trip, Bishop traveled to Brazil in 1951 and ended up living there for 15 years. Bishop's extensive travels fed her interest in international literature, and she published translations of poetry originally written in French, Spanish, and (most famously) Portuguese.
The mid-to-late 20th century was a tumultuous time in world history, as political instability and social tensions bubbled over around the globe. However, Bishop's poems rarely address conflicts and world events directly. Instead, they tend to confront universal human struggles, such as grief and the drive to be understood.
"Crusoe in England" is ostensibly set in the early 1700s, when Robinson Crusoe takes place, though Bishop gives her Crusoe a much more modern-sounding voice than Defoe's character. Defoe, in turn, may have based his Crusoe partly on Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721), a naval officer who spent four years marooned on a desert island in the South Pacific. (Details like Crusoe's "goats" and "goatskin" clothes, for example, derive from Selkirk's real-life adventure.) Scholars have suggested that Charles Darwin's observations in the Galápagos Islands and other remote locations, described in his groundbreaking scientific study On the Origin of Species (1859), may have helped inspire other details in Bishop's poem. For example, Darwin's book discusses volcanoes and volcanic islands, whereas these do not appear in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
Bishop also modernizes the relationship between Crusoe and Friday. Defoe's novel was published at the height of European colonialism, during which Europeans killed and enslaved indigenous Americans in large numbers, while spreading deadly diseases (e.g., smallpox, measles, and flu) to which native populations had never been exposed. Christian missionaries also converted, or attempted to convert, many indigenous Americans to Christianity. Accordingly, Defoe's narrator both proselytizes his companion Friday (a member of a mainland South American tribe) and enlists him as a servant. Bishop's Crusoe, by contrast, never mentions Christianity and describes Friday simply as a "friend[]" (while intimating that he was a romantic partner as well). Only at the end does Bishop gesture toward the deadly legacy of colonialism: Friday dies of exposure to "measles" upon accompanying Crusoe to England.
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More “Crusoe in England” Resources
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External Resources
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Measles and Smallpox in the Americas — Historical context for the poem's tragic ending.
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The Poet's Life and Work — A biography of Bishop via the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poet Reads — Listen to Bishop's reading of the poem, courtesy of the Poetry Archive.
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Bishop and Soares — Background on the longtime relationship between the poet and Lota de Macedo Soares, which some critics consider a key inspiration for the poem.
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The Poem Aloud — A reading of part of the poem, with commentary by Bishop's friend and fellow poet, Frank Bidart.
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The Original Crusoe — Read the original (1719) novel on which the poem is based.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
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