Isolation and Memory
Bishop's Crusoe undergoes two distinct periods of extreme isolation. The first of these, recounted in the earlier stanzas of the poem, is the literal isolation of being stranded alone on the island. The second, though, is a stranger and more complicated type of loneliness. Back in England, Crusoe finds himself set apart from his environment by virtue of his singular experiences. Bishop's visual detail reveals just how thoroughly Crusoe knows the island where he once lived. His memory contains a complete, but now entirely useless and unsharable, index of everything from its volcanoes to its background noises. Because of these vivid and stubborn memories, Crusoe now lives in a lonely, liminal space between his two worlds. Moreover, as he notes several times, outside accounts of his island days do not reflect his experiences: attempts to share these memories with others are inevitably unsuccessful.
Nature
The place from which Crusoe narrates his poem is sheltered and indoors—a wooden house. In contrast, his life on the island was entirely exposed to and engaged with the natural world. In addition, he recounts that he spent most of his time on the island alone, with no human contact to mediate this constant exposure to nature. Nature is in some ways beautiful, awe-inspiring, and brutal in Bishop's depiction, with thrilling aspects like waterspouts—dramatic storms—and lava-covered beaches. But, unexpectedly, for Crusoe it is also deeply boring. The island becomes a site of unbreakable routine and constant, pedestrian sameness. Crusoe does not describe feeling especially frightened or awed, but instead recounts the grinding consistency of his life on the island prior to the arrival of Friday, noting the disappointing size of the island's volcanoes and the annoying, unrelenting sounds of its animals. His time on the island has caused a certain ironic inversion, by which the wilderness feels domestic and ordinary, while the domestic feels bizarre.
Grief and Love
Bishop builds up to a revelation of her speaker's grief, initially describing the way that his remaining artifacts of life on the island seem oddly lifeless now. Bishop implies that, in Crusoe's profound aloneness, objects like his knife offered a kind of companionship, or else served as external confirmation of Crusoe's own humanity and creativity. Decontextualized and deadened, they now are a cause of mild grief. But only in the work's last lines does Bishop reveal a far more literal grief: Crusoe explains that Friday, his sole human companion on the island, has been dead for almost two decades. Crusoe is now entirely alone, with nobody else to share his detailed memories. In addition, Bishop—herself a gay woman—strongly hints at a romantic or sexual element of Crusoe and Friday's relationship. The poem suggests that Crusoe cannot fully mourn for a person he loved, given the sexual mores of the surrounding society.
