Summary
The poem's speaker, Crusoe, has recently read in the newspaper about a volcanic eruption. Sailors watched as volcanic rock emerged and formed a new island. They have given this new island a name. The speaker's own island, where he once lived as a castaway, never got rediscovered or named, and books about his experience haven't been accurate.
His island had fifty-two volcanoes, all dormant and humble enough that he could quickly and easily climb them. He used to climb to the peak of the highest and look down on the rest, counting them and thinking that—if these volcanoes were the grand size one might expect them to be—then, proportionally, he must be a giant. Then he would imagine with horror how large the island's other beings would be, if they too were giants. These included goats, seagulls, turtles, and waves, which would roll in glittering but always seem to fall apart before reaching their destination.
It seemed to Crusoe that all clouds ended up dumped on his island, hovering above the tops of the volcanoes with their dry, hot craters. He wonders if this is why there was so much rain there, or why the island itself seemed to hiss. Turtles would waddle past in their big shells, making a hissing sound like a teakettle. Crusoe reflects that, at the time, he would have given years off his life or taken somebody else's life just for a teakettle. He would hear lava rolling down the beach with a hiss, but then turn around and realize that the hissing sound was only another turtle. Still, the beaches were a patchwork of colors from lava. The black, red, white, and gray did look pretty. He also watched waterspouts, column-shaped storms that form over water, for entertainment. As many as six would form and move, stretching from the clouds to the water's surface—chimney-like, feeble, and priestly. He liked watching the water inside them swirl like smoke, but, beautiful as they were, they weren't good companions.
Often, he'd sink into self-pity, wondering how he'd come to deserve his situation but then thinking that he must deserve it simply by virtue of the fact that it had happened to him. He couldn't remember exactly which choice had led him here, though. In any case, he mused that maybe self-pity wasn't so bad. With his legs hanging down through a volcano's crater, he thought about how pity should come from the person being pitied. So, the more he pitied himself, the more at-home he felt within himself, and the stronger his sense of self became.
Analysis
This poem's premise is an allusion to Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. One of the first (if not the first) English novels, Robinson Crusoe described the life of a sailor shipwrecked on a deserted island. Crusoe ingeniously uses his few surviving tools and the resources of the island to survive, meanwhile becoming devoutly Christian. He eventually encounters other humans in the form of cannibalistic native island inhabitants. He comes to befriend an indigenous man, whom he calls "Friday." Eventually he is rescued, and returns to Europe alongside Friday. This is a highly simplified plot summary, but Bishop herself is primarily interested in the broad outlines of Crusoe's experience—his aloneness, his survival, and his relationship to Friday—rather than attached to the minutiae of the novel or the period in which it was written. This is clear in, among other choices, the poem's diction and syntax. This Crusoe's English sounds modern—like the speech of a twentieth-century narrator rather than an eighteenth-century one. In a sense, this reflects the fact that the original Robinson Crusoe was cutting-edge in terms of form and content for its time—very much a modern work of the eighteenth century.
Much of the space in these early stanzas is devoted to in-depth, painstaking sensory detail about the physical terrain of Crusoe's one-time island home. While most poets devote attention to sensory life, what Bishop includes here is extraordinarily comprehensive, including such details as the number of volcanoes on the island. It becomes clear that Crusoe, having spent years of his life with nothing to do except catalog and observe every facet of the island, now possesses a massive mental reserve of information about it. This allows the reader to understand several things about his experiences.
Firstly, this catalog of detail reveals how intensely bored Crusoe felt on his island. In many ways, both in these early stanzas and beyond, this poem is a deep dive into the experience of extreme boredom. Crusoe describes a crushing level of repetition and routine, tinged, ironically, with constant fear of the unexpected. For instance, Crusoe describes constantly fearing, or perhaps even hoping, that the hissing sounds of the island would reveal themselves to be lava—followed by a realization that they were, less dangerously or thrillingly, merely produced by turtles. With these descriptions of boredom and routine within an environment that seems fascinating and dangerous, Bishop ironically subverts readers' expectations. It is England, where Crusoe now remembers his island experiences, that seems remarkable.
The second effect of the poem's intense sensory detail is the way it highlights Crusoe's aloneness. Now, back in England, liberated from the oppressive boredom of his island isolation, Crusoe is surrounded by a society that cannot understand his past. Bishop depicts this reality with a light touch, only ever hinting at it. But Crusoe's current loneliness, which somewhat complicates the relief of leaving the island, emerges in his critiques of outsiders' writing about his life. He dismisses these depictions as inaccurate, suggesting that others cannot understand what he has lived through. But Bishop takes pains to show that Crusoe's mind is full of now-irrelevant information about a faraway place even years later. As much as he was an extreme misfit on his island, he is now, with his unplaceable memories, something of a misfit in England.
Bishop employs figurative language to show just how distinctive Crusoe's experiences are. He blends references to eighteenth-century British life with descriptions of the island, so that metaphor becomes not merely a tool for vivid description but also one for characterization. For instance, when referring to a turtle on the island, Crusoe draws an unexpected comparison to a teakettle—which in turn prompts a brief meditation on his longing for a real kettle at the time. Later, Crusoe refers to waterspouts as "chimneys," evoking a faraway architecture, and calls them "sacerdotal," a word meaning "priestlike." Through personification, Bishop sheds light on Crusoe's longing for companionship—and by specifically comparing these natural forms to priests, Bishop evokes the religious and social structures of her speaker's former English world.
