A new volcano has erupted,
the papers say, and last week I was reading
where some ship saw an island being born:
This poem has a fairly complicated timeline: Crusoe is narrating many years of his life on the island from his current home in England, frequently shifting between past and present. These opening lines help anchor the reader in the speaker's present, showing that Crusoe is very much back in England. At the same time, these lines show, reminders of his experiences as a castaway continue to follow him in the form of newspaper reports and other secondhand evidence. The vivid, personal detail of his memories sits in juxtaposition with these references to written reports: what was once immediate has become distant, mediated by language and print.
The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,
hissing like teakettles.
(And I’d have given years, or taken a few,
for any sort of kettle, of course)
Whereas most people might not connect the domesticity of a teakettle to a turtle in a deserted wilderness, Bishop depicts the way that, because of his unique array of experiences, these two objects become tied together in Crusoe's mind. Here, Bishop uses punctuation—parentheses, specifically—to navigate the poem's complicated timeline and to depict the collision of experiences and references in Crusoe's consciousness. Stepping back from the simile linking the turtle to the teakettle, which intensely evokes the island itself, the parentheses signals the introduction of a new narrative distance, in which Crusoe muses more reflectively about the desires that once seemed urgent to him.
...The books
I’d read were full of blanks;
the poems – well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
“They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss…” The bliss of what?
Crusoe's longing for books and poetry, so intense that he tries to recall lines from memory, reveals an untameable desire for connection to other people and to artistic objects. Crusoe's need for art and for products of uniquely human ingenuity is suggested elsewhere in the work as well—Bishop describes his work crafting objects like a parasol, or his choice to dye a goat for his own amusement, in almost artistic terms. Interestingly, the poem that Crusoe quotes in these lines (William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud") is an ode to the joy of solitude in nature, narrated by a speaker who nostalgically remembers these solitary experiences. This parallels Bishop's poem, but its inclusion is also somewhat ironic: Crusoe cannot in fact take joy in his lonely wandering, since he needs poetry and other human creations to feel fulfilled.
– And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
seventeen years ago come March.
The poem closes with a revelation, squeezed into two short lines, that the speaker's beloved Friday has died. Elizabeth Bishop is known for her movingly understated depictions of intense, even devastating emotion. Here, the quickness with which the speaker discloses this news—and the way that the poem ends abruptly thereafter—suggest that it is painful for Crusoe, perhaps to the extent that he cannot fully engage with the information. It also hints that Crusoe cannot truthfully describe his relationship to Friday, partly because of the queer subtext that Bishop builds out earlier in the poem and partly because their bond is so linked to their unusual, indescribable experience on the island. Finally, the reference to "measles" brings a sharp postcolonial critique to the work's final line by referencing the history of deadly infectious disease epidemics brought to indigenous populations during colonial expansion.
