Crusoe in England Literary Elements

Robinson Crusoe, narrating following his return to England.

Free verse with variously sized stanzas and some use of iambic pentameter.

Similes include "The turtles lumbered by, high-domed, / hissing like teakettles," "I watched the water spiral up in them like smoke," "When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded / like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves," "The knife there on the shelf – / it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix," and "It still will work but, folded up / looks like a plucked and skinny fowl." Metaphors include "– a glittering hexagon of rollers," and "Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated." Generally, Bishop uses metaphorical language referring to Crusoe's life in England, showing that his frame of reference on the island remains his life in Europe.

Alliterative passages include "The sun set in the sea;" "a sooty, scrub affair," and "a goat, too, or a gull." Assonant passages include "last week I was reading," "mostly overcast," "miserable, small volcanoes I could climb / with a few slithery strides," and "frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs."

One of the poem's major situational ironies is the fact that Crusoe experiences his island largely as a place of boredom, in spite of—or even because of—the fact that it is also a site of danger. Another instance of irony is the fact that Crusoe speaks the most tersely and curtly about experiences that seem emotionally charged and important, particularly his relationship with, and grief over, Friday.

Lyric poetry

The poem is set both on a deserted island and in England. It is based on an early eighteenth-century novel but its chronological setting is ambiguous.

Mournful, bittersweet, forlorn

Crusoe is the protagonist, but the poem has no clear antagonist

One of the poem's major conflicts is simply Crusoe's effort to survive on the deserted island. Another is Crusoe's interior battle to reconcile two disconnected elements of his life—his period alone on the island and his post-rescue period in England.

The poem's climax is the one-line stanza "And then one day they came and took us off."

The early line "None of the books has ever got it right" foreshadows Crusoe's upcoming series of revelations about his life on the island.

Crusoe uses understated language to describe his relationship with Friday, in lines such as "Friday was nice. / Friday was nice, and we were friends." The poem's climactic line, "And then one day they came and took us off," is also dramatically understated.

The entire poem is a lengthy allusion to Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, and it contains an allusion to William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

The line "And why sometimes the whole place hissed?" uses metonymy, referring to the island itself hissing rather than to individual inhabitants of the island. The metaphorical description "My blood was full of them; my brain / bred islands" uses synecdoche, substituting individual parts of Crusoe's body for Crusoe himself.

The poem contains a great deal of personification. Crusoe describes volcanoes as "standing up, / naked and leaden, with their heads blown off." Waterspouts "come and go, advancing and retreating, / their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches/of scuffed-up white." Meanwhile, Crusoe says of his knife, "Now it won’t look at me at all. / The living soul has dribbled away."

With the lines "None of the books has ever got it right," and "(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)" Crusoe hyperbolically dismisses outside accounts of his time on the island.

Bishop uses onomatopoeia to describe the sounds made by animals in this work, including many referencing to the "hiss" of turtles and the lines "Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek,/ baa... shriek... baa...."