Summary
Crusoe describes how the sun would set and rise from the ocean. The island had just one of everything: a single sun, a single sea, a single Crusoe, even a single type of snail. The snail was bright blue with a delicate shell. These animals would bunch together at the base of the island's single dirty-looking tree species, and at a distance they almost looked like iris flowers. The island also had a single type of berry, which was red. Crusoe experimented with these berries by eating them one at a time, leaving hours between this attempt to determine whether they were edible. They weren't terribly sour and didn't harm him, so he used them to brew a beer-like drink. This tasted awful but made him drunk. He would drink it and then play a homemade flute with a bizarre set of notes, dancing with the island's goats. Ultimately, he reflects, everything and everyone is homemade in a sense. He says that he felt affectionately towards his tiny island-based industries, but then backtracks, arguing that their smallness was sad rather than admirable.
He bemoans that he didn't know enough about any topic, from Greek plays to astronomy, to entertain himself by thinking about these topics or reciting texts about them. He'd try to recall books but forget their content, and while he would try and recite poetry to the iris-like snails, he'd forget the lines. He recites a few lines of one poem—a passage from Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"—but trails off, explaining that he couldn't recall the end, but that he looked it up as soon as he arrived home.
The island smelled like goats and animal droppings. The goats and seagulls were white, and they were either tame or simply thought that Crusoe was one of their species. He can't seem to get the sound of their calls out of his ears—in fact, they're persistent enough to give him a headache. The question-and-answer cadence of their calls annoyed him, combined with the turtles' incessant hissing. When the island's birds flew up from the ground as a group, they made a sound like trees rustling in the wind, and Crusoe would close his eyes and imagine big, shady trees. He knew of cases where cattle would become sick or insane from being on an island, and he suspected that something similar had happened to the island's goats. One used to climb to the peak of a volcano that Crusoe, in his ample spare time, had named "Mont d'Espoir" (French for "mount hope," but Crusoe explains that this was a play on "Mount Despair"). The goat would aimlessly bleat and smell the air. Crusoe once grabbed him by his beard and stared into his eyes. The goat didn't react. Crusoe grew tired even of the island's colors. One day he used berries to dye a baby goat red, and the goat's mother couldn't recognize it.
His dreams were even worse than his waking hours. Some were about love and food, and these were pleasant, but others were terrifying: he'd dream about accidentally slitting the throat of a human baby after mistaking it for a goat, or he'd dream about endless streams of near-identical islands, each of which he'd have to live on and get to know in detail.
Analysis
The original novel Robinson Crusoe is notable partially for the way its protagonist embodies ideals of industriousness and resourcefulness, finding ways to create a micro-civilization from scratch in the wilderness, and eventually even spreading his own European Christianity to the indigenous Friday. Bishop's version of Crusoe is much the same, but his creations are depicted as desperate, almost random expressions of an innate human desire to create. One way to read this poem is as an ode to, or acknowledgment of, the human desire for culture and artistic creation. Defoe's Crusoe was radically independent, capable of crafting a civilization from scratch, but Bishop's has an inbuilt hunger for the intellectual and creative lives of others. When he dyes a baby goat, his decision is something of a rebellion against the sameness of nature, and indeed it seems to actively go against nature—hence the goat's mother failing to recognize it, as if, by being subjected to human artistic intervention, it has violated what is natural. In a sense, Bishop suggests, all art comes out of a desolate longing to create something that diverges from the repetitiveness of the natural world.
In this regard, Bishop's choice of a poem to reference is a fascinating one. Crusoe tries, and fails, to remember the words of William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." This is a poem about the transcendent beauty of solitary immersion in nature. Like "Crusoe in England," it is narrated by a speaker who has returned to domestic life, but recalls a previous experience of solitude in the natural world. Unlike Bishop's speaker, Wordsworth's is nostalgic, speaking forlornly about the comfort offered by these memories of nature. But for Crusoe, this very poem comes to represent the frustration and the devastating loneliness of the natural world. When he returns to England, he immediately looks up the poem's text: he needs books, culture, and other human beings to adequately enjoy a poem about the joy of solitude and wilderness.
By midway through this poem, meanwhile, it is apparent that no consistent meter or rhyme structure will emerge. This work does not follow a set formal structure—it is a free-verse poem (though it does often dip in and out of iambic pentameter, the most common meter in English poetry). This lack of strict form aids its informal, conversational tone. The unevenness of Bishop's stanza lengths mimics the roving of Crusoe's own mind as he moves mentally back and forth between England, where he currently is, and the island he once survived on. A web of associations shifts him constantly back and forth between these two settings, and the looseness of Bishop's form allows her to effectively follow those thoughts, employing stanza breaks, line breaks, and sound shifts to echo her speaker's mental shifting. Moreover, the poem's formal unstructuredness gives it a modern mood—the free-verse poem came to dominate during the twentieth century. This serves to further separate Bishop's version of Crusoe from the original, eighteenth-century version. It is not only his references and diction that are post-eighteenth-century, but the very poetic form in which he narrates as well.
