Teaching Poetry: Self and World in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”

By Zainab Cheema 

When we travel, who is the self that returns home? And what exactly is that home? This is the reflection question that I ask my students at the end of my Traveling the World, Imagining the Globe literature seminar. Asking students to think of how travel literature changes their perception of themselves and of their “home” —whether it be neighborhood, state, nation, diaspora or fandom—opens the door to meaty social justice conversations. To model their reflection of the medieval and early modern texts from the course, we do a class reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem: Crusoe in England. An adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s famous novel Robinson Crusoe, Bishop uses Defoe’s shipwrecked hero as an autobiographical reflection of her dislocations and migrations that shaped her poetry as she shuttled between Canada, Massachusetts, England and Brazil. In this blog post, I want to do a reading of some verses of the poem with you.

Self and World: An Infinity of Doubles

Written from the perspective of a crusty old Crusoe (un)settled in England remembering his years of shipwreck and exile in the Caribbean, Bishop’s free verse poem begins with an explosion:

“A new volcano has erupted,

the papers say, and last week I was reading   

where some ship saw an island being born:   

at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;   

and then a black fleck—basalt, probably—

rose in the mate’s binoculars

and caught on the horizon like a fly.

They named it. But my poor old island’s still   

un-rediscovered, un-renamable.

None of the books has ever got it right.”

The first two lines of the poem establish the verse’s rhythm: the way the poet swings between the raw energy of the unnamed island and the quiet doldrums of his retirement in England. Crusoe’s mind conjures up a geography that splinters into a ghostly set of doubled islands and doubled selves: England and the Caribbean. The new volcanic island and Crusoe’s old one. The writer’s raw creative mind and the reflective one of discourse, of hierarchy, of power. The baby volcano island introduces the energy that immediately is dissipated by his mention of the newspapers that collect, organize, and editorialize the information (“the papers say”). Bishop’s simile of the new island caught in the sailors’ binoculars like a fly mocks the way nations and empires use technology to “discover” and rename things in their own image—that is, to fix and sterilize things. The other island, Crusoe’s island, remains a hissing, exploding, steaming space that is not yet rediscovered or renamed or pinned to a map—and all the more powerful for it.

Poetry as Disorientation

Bishop famously read Charles Darwin’s journals on the Galapagos islands to come up with her poet-narrator’s descriptions of the lost island. In the next verse, Crusoe calls his island “a cloud dump” peopled by “hissing, ambulating turtles.” For Crusoe, remembering and describe it is an act of disorienting the self.

“All the hemisphere’s   

left-over clouds arrived and hung

above the craters—their parched throats   

were hot to touch.”

The tense enjambments creates a sense of visual and spatial disorientation—the clustered clouds massed over the hot parched (and steaming?) volcano craters makes it difficult to see anything besides clouds and steam. The enjambment after “parched throats” makes you wonder for moment whether it’s the clouds or craters (or Crusoe?) that are hot and thirsty? The sense of disorientation continues, as Crusoe confusedly remembers walking along the small volcanoes that

“. . . if they were the size   

I thought volcanoes should be, then I had   

become a giant;

and if I had become a giant,

I couldn’t bear to think what size   

the goats and turtles were,”

I personally love Crusoe’ fantasy of gigantic goats and turtles walking around on the island. But I especially love how Crusoe-in-exile (and Crusoe the narrator) loses his sense of scale. The Renaissance’s most annoying contribution has been the idea of man as the measure of the universe. The cloudy, steamy, heated Carribean island totally disorients this patriarchal, imperialist sense of scale. We do get a little bit of man-centricness with his line “And I had waterspouts” (which Crusoe delivers in the deadpan tone of someone remembering his grandmother’s china cabinet). But the poem’s irregular rhythms make it clear that the island is in command with its “beaches . . .  all lava, variegated, black, red, and white, and gray.”

Knowledge and Home 

Crusoe is telling us about his island back in England, irritably complaining “I’m old./ I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,” not the one he had to manufacture using wild herbs. The local museum is asking for the tools with which he carved out his survival on the island, things like his old knife: “it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix/ It lived.” Now, the old knife is as irrelevant as the half-forgotten books he’d tried to remember and recite when shipwrecked on the Caribbean,

“. . . 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?   

One of the first things that I did

when I got back was look it up.”

Knowledge. Poetry. Science. Drama. The steaming hissing island reduced it to blanks. It turned those high-brow references and the hierarchies of power that give them their meaning into the restless and pointless itch of a Google search. Students related to those lines because our climate change and political chaos is a similar kind of shipwreck. When the compass of our world is disoriented, we fill in the gaps with the old scraps, scripts and quotations of knowledge and power. The dilemma is that they don’t seem to fit the scale of the problems. Bishop reminds us that out of context, knowledge and things lose their living aura—they just become artefacts.

In Crusoe in England, Bishop shows us that the traveling self that returns is not one self, but many. Similarly, home is not one either but legion. England doesn’t seem to be Crusoe’s home—he is as exiled and irrelevant there as he was on his hissing, steaming Caribbean island. Where is his home? Crusoe remembers the moment that saved him out in the Caribbean:

“Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it   

another minute longer, Friday came.   

(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)   

Friday was nice.

Friday was nice, and we were friends.   

If only he had been a woman!”

Students remarked on the euphemisms that crusty old Crusoe uses to refer to Friday. Crusoe patronizes him, dismisses him, tries to correct the record of their relationship, but cannot bring himself to say what is obvious—this is the one meaning bearing relationship that was for him “home.” The haunting desire for the absent Friday is the line that Bishop choses to end her poem on. 

If you teach literature, early modern studies, eco-criticism; gender studies, colonialism (or if you just love poetry and want to sneak verse into your classroom), consider building a lesson plan around Bishop’s Crusoe in England. Let me know how it goes!  

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