Summary
Then, Crusoe recounts, Friday arrived. In the original Crusoe, Friday is the indigenous man who becomes a friend and companion to Crusoe following his long period of solitude. Crusoe says that outside accounts of Friday's arrival are inaccurate. Friday was a nice person and a friend of his, he says, but he wished he had been a woman, because they both wanted to have children. Sometimes Friday would pet, chase, or hold the goats—which Crusoe enjoyed watching, since Friday had a nice body. Then, one day, rescuers arrived and took Crusoe and Friday to England.
Now he lives in England, which is an island too, though it doesn't feel like one. Once, he felt full of islands, as if they were in his brain and blood, but the archipelago where he once lived has disappeared. He's old and bored, drinking tea in a wooden house. The knife he once used on the island now sits on a shelf, and it once seemed as full of meaning as a crucifix. He spent years hoping it would stay intact, and knew every blemish and mark on it. Now it seems dead, as if avoiding eye contact with him, and his eyes move on from it quickly.
The museum in town has requested that he leave them everything from his island sojourn, from his homemade flute to his knife to his clothes to his now moth-eaten trousers, made of goatskin. They also want his parasol, which took him a long time to make, because he had to remember exactly how the ribs were supposed to be arranged. It's still usable but now it's in England, folded up and looking like a plucked bird. Why, he wonders, would anybody want these objects? He then reveals that Friday is dead, having died of measles seventeen years ago.
Analysis
This poem is Bishop's longest, and its first eight stanzas feel stretching, almost neverending, in imitation of the unending, unchanging boredom of the experiences being described. But this rapidly shifts in these final four stanzas. The poem is deliberately chronologically unbalanced, with an abrupt series of narrative shifts and a speeding up of time in the final third. The first of these shifts is the arrival of Friday, in stanza eight. Whereas the island's goats, gulls, and turtles, and its smells and sounds, all receive luxuriously long descriptive passages, Friday receives a single cramped stanza light on detail. In fact, Crusoe seems almost to purposely obscure information, using vague language like "Friday was nice, and we were friends." Two distinct effects are achieved here. Firstly, Bishop shows how Friday's arrival puts an end to Crusoe's brutal boredom, making time feel faster. Secondly, Bishop suggests a veiled homoerotic relationship between Crusoe and Friday. Secrecy and vagueness in and of themselves would not necessarily create this impression, but Crusoe speaks explicitly about wishing he could have children with Friday, and about enjoying the sight of Friday's body.
The poem's ninth stanza is even more abrupt, to a nearly comic degree: in a single line Crusoe simply says that he and Friday were removed from the island. This line contains only clipped, one-syllable words. It suggests that Crusoe's removal from the island felt very sudden, or that perhaps it was very distressing. We experience almost no transition between the current Crusoe at home in England and the version of Crusoe on the island, which echoes his own feelings of disjointedness, as he attempts to reconcile and understand the relationship between these two parts of his life.
Most sudden of all, perhaps, is the revelation in the poem's final lines that Friday has died. This is all the more sudden precisely because the lines are not separated by a stanza break; instead, Bishop squeezes the information into an existing stanza. These lines are emotionally charged, with Crusoe allowing himself the effusiveness of the phrase "my dear Friday," but they feel almost hidden or snuck into the end of the poem. This suggests that Crusoe does not entirely know how to categorize or express his grief. In the context of the poem, this awkward expression of grief seems to come from a few places—partly from the suggestion that Crusoe and Friday were in love or at least attracted to each other, and partly from the fact that Friday himself is representative of Crusoe's difficult, hard-to-categorize island days. Indeed, with Friday gone, Crusoe now has nobody in England who understands or remembers that period of his life. Meanwhile, Friday himself is in fact an indigenous, native inhabitant of the island where Crusoe was stranded. For this reason, Bishop suggests, he fell victim to measles, like many victims of colonialism who died of infectious diseases to which they lacked immunity. In this way, Bishop subverts the assumptions of Robinson Crusoe. While to Crusoe, the tropical island is a place of threat and exoticism, for Friday (and for Crusoe himself, now accustomed to being a castaway) England is also a threatening, dangerous island.
