CRUSOE IN ENGLAND

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 fleckbasalt, probably
rose in the mates binoculars
and caught on the horizon like a fly.
They named it. But my poor old islands still
un-rediscovered, un-renamable.
None of the books has ever got it right.
Well, I had fifty-two
miserable, small volcanoes I could climb
with a few slithery strides
volcanoes dead as ash heaps.
I used to sit on the edge of the highest one
and count the others standing up,
naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.
Id think 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 couldnt bear to think what size
the goats and turtles were,
or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers
a glittering hexagon of rollers
closing and closing in, but never quite,
glittering and glittering, though the sky
was mostly overcast.
My island seemed to be
a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemispheres
left-over clouds arrived and hung
above the craterstheir parched throats
were hot to touch.
Was that why it rained so much?
And why sometimes the whole place hissed?
The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,
hissing like teakettles.
(And Id have given years, or taken a few,
for any sort of kettle, of course.)
The folds of lava, running out to sea,
would hiss. Id turn. And then theyd prove
to be more turtles.
The beaches were all lava, variegated,

black, red, and white, and gray;

the marbled colors made a fine display.
And I had waterspouts. Oh,
half a dozen at a time, far out,
theyd come and go, advancing and retreating,
their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches
of scuffed-up white.
Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
sacerdotal beings of glass ... I watched
the water spiral up in them like smoke.
Beautiful, yes, but not much company.
I often gave way to self-pity.
Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.
I wouldnt be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I dont remember, but there could have been.
Whats wrong about self-pity, anyway?
With my legs dangling down familiarly
over a craters edge, I told myself
Pity should begin at home. So the more
pity I felt, the more I felt at home.
The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me.
The island had one kind of everything:
one tree snail, a bright violet-blue
with a thin shell, crept over everything,
over the one variety of tree,
a sooty, scrub affair.
Snail shells lay under these in drifts
and, at a distance,
youd swear that they were beds of irises.
There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;
and so I made home-brew. Id drink
the awful, fizzy, stinging stuff
that went straight to my head
and play my home-made flute
(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)
and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.
Home-made, home-made! But arent we all?
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries.

No, not exactly, since the smallest was

a miserable philosophy.
Because I didnt know enough.
Why didnt I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
Id read were full of blanks;
the poemswell, 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.
The island smelled of goat and guano.
The goats were white, so were the gulls,
and both too tame, or else they thought
I was a goat, too, or a gull.
Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek,
baa ... shriek ... baa ... I still cant shake
them from my ears; theyre hurting now.
The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies
over a ground of hissing rain
and hissing, ambulating turtles
got on my nerves.
When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded
like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.
Id shut my eyes and think about a tree,
an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.
Id heard of cattle getting island-sick.
I thought the goats were.
One billy-goat would stand on the volcano
Id christened Mont dEspoir or Mount Despair
(Id time enough to play with names),
and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.
Id grab his beard and look at him.
His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up
and expressed nothing, or a little malice.
I got so tired of the very colors!
One day I dyed a baby goat bright red
with my red berries, just to see
something a little different.
And then his mother wouldnt recognize him.
Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food
and love, but they were pleasant rather

than otherwise. But then Id dream of things

like slitting a babys throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. Id have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that I had to live
on each and every one, eventually,
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography.
Just when I thought I couldnt 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!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
Hed pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.
And then one day they came and took us off.
Now I live here, another island,
that doesnt seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. Im old.
Im bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
The knife there on the shelf
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle ...
Now it wont look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.
The local museums asked me to
leave everything to them:

the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,

my shedding goatskin trousers
(moths have got in the fur),
the parasol that took me such a time
remembering the way the ribs should go.
It still will work but, folded up,
looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.
How can anyone want such things?
And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
seventeen years ago come March.
The island is un-renamable, which implies it was named by someone once. In fact, the
speaker in the poem named it The Island of Despair, for its volcano centerpiece, Mont
dEspoir or Mount Despair. He had time to play with names; twenty-eight years, by at least
one account. The speaker is, of course, the protagonist of Daniel Defoes 1719 novel, Robinson
Crusoe and he isnt. Defoes Robinson was Christian, civilized, and strongly empirical in his
thinking; Bishops Crusoe is skeptical and unsure of his knowledge and memory. Both are
displaced figures, but Defoes Robinson feels that displacement most acutely on the island upon
which he is shipwrecked. Bishops Crusoe feels more displaced after his return to another
island,/ that doesnt seem like one His home country of England. Crusoe was lonely on the
island; its clouds, volcanoes, and water-spouts were no consolation beautiful, yes, but not
much company. He experiences a dislocation of physical scale, as Bishop Biographer Lorrie
Goldensohn observed.
Hes a giant compared to the volcanoes, which appear in miniature from such distance; the goats
and turtles, too. It is, Goldensohn writes, an analogue of the nausea of connection and
disconnection.
Then Friday arrives, but even their relationship, in the Bishop poem, is tinged with loneliness.
They both long for love they cannot consummate, I wanted to propagate my kind,/ and so did
he, I think, poor boy. Defoes Robinson is much less isolated. His island is visited by native
cannibals who take their victims to the island to be eaten (Friday is their prisoner; until Crusoe
saves him and names him), as well as Spaniards, and English mutineers. This last group helps
Robinson return to England with Friday. There are other adventures in the novel, including a
voyage to Lisbon and a crossing of the Pyrenees on foot.
None of this is for Bishop. Her goal was not to re-write the novel, but to re-imagine the story.
Her Crusoe possesses, as C.K. Doreski has noted, a weary tonality of such authenticity her
character seems not an extension of Defoes fictional exile, but a real Crusoe, endowed with a
twentieth-century emotional frankness. Bishops Crusoe finds even deeper loneliness back
home, with its uninteresting lumber. Once there, he longs for the intensity of life on his
island, its violence and self determination, and its objects full of meaning. Disconcertingly, as
Goldensohn describes it, Crusoe discovers that the misery from which he so willingly fled was
the chief stock of his life.

Defoes Robinson returns to England to find nothing there for him. Crusoes family thought him
dead after his 28-year absence, and there is no inheritance for him, no fortune to claim, no home.
Crusoe, in Bishops devising, also finds nothing for him at home, despite the longing he felt for it
while a castaway. His loss is a spiritual and cultural loss. While on the island, he tried to hold on
to his home culture. He makes tea and a kind of fizzy fermented drink from berries he
discovers, even a homemade flute with the weirdest scale on earth. Alas, he doesnt remember
enough of his cultures great literature to make him feel at home,
The books
Id 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.
The bliss is, of course, solitude, which is the word completing this line from Wordsworths
Daffodils ( I wandered lonely as a cloud). We forgive Bishop this anachronism;
Wordsworths poem was written over one hundred years after Defoes novel. By referencing this
line she creates a sense of displacement or dislocation in us, her readers. For Bishops Crusoe,
solitude approaches bliss by way of banality, especially when he reflects on what was lost
including Friday, who was introduced with the banal phrase, Friday was nice and we were
friends. The potency of their relationship is merely hinted at; perhaps reflecting Bishops own
sense of decorum in matters personal. (Accounts of that have everything all wrong, Bishop
writes.) Some critics have suggested that Friday in this poem is a stand-in for Lota de Soares
Macedo, Bishops Brazilian lover; while others, James Merrill among them, wondered why
Bishop couldnt give us a bit more about Friday? For almost as soon as Friday arrives they are
taken off the island. By the end of the poem, we learn that Friday died of measles while in
England, presumably a disease to which he had no immunity.
Bishop began writing Crusoe in England in the early 1960s although notebook entries from
1934 hint that the poem may have its origins in her time at Vassar and picked it up again after
Lotas death in 1967. She worked on it again after a visit to Charles Darwins home in Kent. She
relied on Darwins notes from the Galapagos for her depiction of the island, along with Herman
Melvilles Encantadas, and perhaps Randall Jarrells The Island, as has been suggested, as
well as on her own experience of tropical and sub-tropical locales.
By the time she visited Galapagos in 1971, however, the poem had been delivered to The New
Yorker. She must have been fairly pleased that her description was almost spot-on. Bishops
friend and fellow poet, Robert Lowell, thought Crusoe to be maybe your very best poem,

An analogue to your life,Lowell wrote in a letter to Bishop, or an Ode to Dejection.

Nothing youve written has such a mix of humor and desperation.
Its true this poem has a kind of desperation to it that comes from desolation and longing, for
home, in particular, be it the island or England. Bishops humor is evident, too, in such lines as
Whats wrong about self-pity, anyway?
With my legs dangling down familiarly
over a craters edge, I told myself
pity should begin at home. So the more
pity I felt, the more I felt at home.
By making [Crusoe's] life center around the idea of home, writes biographer Brett Miller,
Bishop brings him in line with her own habitually secular and domestic points of view. Crusoe
was also an unwitting solitary, who reluctantly gave in to his plight. As such, he appealed to
Bishop, especially in his self-reliance. He made things from whats at hand, just as she made
poems from what surrounded her. She, too, had given in to her exile in Brazil. Theres an
ungentle madness to Crusoe the solitary, which also contrasts somewhat with Defoes Robinson.
The latter reads the Bible and becomes increasingly more religious. Bishops Crusoe is more
pagan, painting goats with berry juice, dreaming of slitting a babys throat, mistaking it/ for a
baby goat, and has visions of endlessly repeating islands where he is fated to catalog their flora
and fauna. The last reference is almost a nightmare reflection of the poets own self-exile and
imprisonment by her style: her oft-cited gift for description, which she saw as limiting.
Regardless of whether Bishop saw herself in her Crusoe, her own removal to New England from
Brazil to Harvards uninteresting lumber must have caused equal disconnection, a
dislocating dizziness, to borrow Goldensohns phrase.
When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived, Bishop
wrote to Robert Lowell in 1948. In Crusoe in England, she captures the loneliness,
displacement, and loss of an individual set adrift in emotional isolation, which leads to a kind of
post-traumatic stress syndrome.
For Crusoe, his island life seemed interminable and insufferable, only to turn romantic and
desirable when the experience ended. It seems likely Bishop was thinking of her life in Brazil
with Lota, which had become increasingly strained towards the end, until the latters suicide, and
the poets life thereafter. That makes this poem, along with One Art, from the same collection,
an elegy with a depth beyond its surface.
In Bishops poem, Crusoe in England, the main character, Robinson Crusoe, has a vivid sense
of the world around him. He seems to have been exiled on this island for so long that he has
become deeply in synch with his surroundings: the flora, the fauna, and the geography. This
sense of connection Crusoe has is portrayed in Bishops mastery of description and her fine

attention to detail. Readers sense such a close connection between word and actuality in this
poem that reality begins to take the backseat to this fictional island that Bishop has created. Her
attention to detail gives the theme of authenticity that Crusoe possesses during his time on the
island. He sees life vividly with goggles that make life beautiful and adventurous. While he is
lonely on the island and feels a sense of Oneness and solidarity, he seems so in tune with his
soul and his inner-self that it seems to compensate for his isolation. Though Crusoe seems to be
in synch with himself, this vivid attention to detail may mark him as insane to some. Bishops
Crusoe seems to have gone a little mad with all of the time spent alone in exile. Could this
attention to detail be a sign of Crusoes impending madness? Perhaps. But then again, this vivid
imagination is something to celebrate. Not many people can view the world around them with
such clarity as Crusoe seemed to do. The time on the island seemed to make him the best version
of himself. One that was free, real, and imaginative. The idea of the knife in this poem is
interesting in regards to attention to detail. Bishop writes when Crusoe has returned to England,
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. It lived. How many years did I beg it, implore it, not to
break? I knew each nick and scratch by heart, the bluish blade, the broken tip, the lines of woodgrain on the handle Now it wont look at me at all. The living soul has dribbled away. Could
this knife be the pen in Crusoes life? Is it what he is using to recount all of the glorious sights he
sees during his time on the island? This metaphor could be an explanation for his vivid attention
to detail throughout the poem, and then shows how he cant even pick up his pen anymore when
he returns to England. When he is finally rescued and returns to England in the poem, this
vividness and imagination completely halts. Bishops language becomes languid and slow. She
writes with less urgency and fervor, and her character seems to have a lens of complacency and
mediocrity so vastly different from the lens of the Crusoe on the island. The theme of
authenticity is gone, and a theme of remorse and sadness has taken over in her writing. This
rescue seems to have taken the life out of Crusoe. He no longer views objects and the world
around him with attention to detail as he once did. Could his acute attention have ultimately
caused his demise? It seems that his exciting life abroad could be the reason he becomes so
broken at the end of the poem. He sees things as a burden, and is frustrated by the museums
desire to showcase his possessions. He even shares that he is bored with his life- what a dull
thing to be when he used to live a life full of magic.
Crusoe in England presents a colonizers revisions of both the project and the process from the
perspective of lived experience. Bishop begins a game of linguistic destabilization with her
choice of the title; for Crusoe, who is always already associated in the readers mind with his
uninhabited tropical island is strategically has reminded us, Crusoe comes back to England but
is still tied to the umbilical cord of his island. In fact, Bishops Crusoe is fated to go on
negotiating the chain of meeting and loss that his arrival at, stay in and rescue from the
uninhabited island brought him. In fact, he has found his island, lived there and left it for other
islands. Similarly, he had lost his shipmates, found Friday and lost him. But, the surface
certainties of this referentiality get dispersed across the poems narrative structure. Bishop
exhibits an extraordinary penchant for indeterminacy by partly revealing and partly concealing a
post-structural interpretative possibility. According to Robert Boschman,

While Crusoe [Defoes hero] sees its narrator splitting his perspective between England, which
represents the domesticated past, and the wild, unnamed island where he has been shipwrecked
alone, Bishops speaker emphasizes [...] how his island eventually became home even as
England gradually became an alien place. After his long solitude, Bishops Crusoe now finds
himself dislocated in England another island, / that doesnt seem, but who decides?
(Boschman:2009, 152).
Thus, the poem collates the subject-positions of the speaker from the opposite poles of exile and
domicile. At the same time Bishop defamiliarizes the ordinary experiences that get continually
deferred in the process of signification. In Fans words, Crusoe in England returns to the
chasm between text and experiencesand to dislocation (Fan: 2005, 45). Thus, the immediate
gets mediated by the modes of knowledge and reportage that we superimpose upon it through
our preconception and representation Crusoe in England opens by describing Crusoes account
of the discovery of an island as reported in the newspaper. According to the report, the birth of
this island was seen by some passing ship. Thus, the mariners/passengers of the passing ship, the
newspaper reporter, Crusoe as reader, and Bishop as poet all stand the chance and run the risk
of distorting as well as reconstructing a natural process through their divergent subject positions
as revealed through their reception and reportage:
at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;
and then a black fleckbasalt, probably
rose in the mates binoculars
and caught on the horizon like a fly. (CP. 192)
The representational nature of this reality (i.e. the birth of the island) problematizes any notion of
knowledge as is suggested in the last line of the first stanza: None of the books has ever got it
right (CP 192). No mode of knowledge, Bishop implies here, has ever got it right or can ever
get it right. This points up the fact that a direct first-hand impression or experience of nature is
inaccessible to us; for reality is always mediated through the supplemental aid of papers or
binoculars, and we should therefore make the necessary allowance for all the delay and
deferment that the repetition inherent in such representation demands. As the island was created
by volcanic eruption, Bishops Crusoe shifts his attention to volcanoes. Michael Ryan shows us
how descriptive language, here, assumes a reductive austerity (miserable, small volcanoes,
a few slithery strides, volcanoes dead as ash heaps). Since knowledge remains grounded in a
perspective that is itself in contact with and in the grip of the word, knowledge without
binoculars brings a mere literal sense of objects that operates at variance with the accounts to
befound in books, substitute descriptions in language that can never get it right (Ryan: 1999,
92). Bishop is aware of and fascinated by the fact that perspective alteration may, and often does,
alter reality and its perception. She as a result cannot be impervious to the implication that our
ethical concerns about the right and the wrong are contingent initially on perception and
eventually on perspective:
Id think 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 couldnt bear to think what size the goats and turtles were.
Life on this island is characterized by its quiet bliss as well as its irksome sameness and a lack of
human company. Crusoes loneliness is alleviated temporarily, just as it is in Defoes Robinson
Crusoe, by the arrival of Friday:

Just when I thought I couldnt stand it

another minute longer, Friday came.
That Accounts of that have everything all wrong testifies to the pseudo-factual nature of
representation. The identity of Friday is imbricated by being the embodiment of the colonizers
will for human subjects and on account of a veiled reference to a mutual desire between Crusoe
and Friday:
Friday was nice
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
The same vein of appreciation is continued in Crusoes assertion, Pretty to watch; he had a
pretty body (CP 194). The hint of a heterosexual narrative thwarting the reality and/or
desirability of their relation, If only he had been a woman gets brushed aside by the final
endearment, Friday, my dear Friday (CP 196) as also by the sense of loss that the death of
Friday entails for Crusoe, the provisional speaker of the poem. Bishop's poem, as Victoria
Harrison points out, downplays the hierarchy Defoe establishes between the two men
(Harrison: 1993, 191). As Harrison further states, Although Crusoe speaks for Friday; he does
so less as colonizer than as surviving, mourning friend (Harrison: 1993, 191).
Crusoe and Friday share a happy life together. But, their Utopian life in the island is cut short as
they are rescued/miscued:
And then one day they came and took us off.
Now I live here, another island,
that doesnt seem like one, but who decides?
This curt statement blots out the givens of an authentic existence. The weighted present gets
swamped by the temporal vortex of a contingent continuum as Bishop allows both deletion and
articulation to stand and mean. The subsidence of a whole saga into a single sentence is signalled
as Crusoe resets the historical, chronological frame discarding established formal considerations.
The intrusive And that abruptly ushers in the event at once telescopes and superposes narrative
elements into staging devices. In this context, C.K. Doreski comments Only in retrospect does it
become clear that them and us, then and now form the lyric hinges of the poem, the rhetorical
elements that defer narrative in favour of lyric or meditative strategies (Doreski: 1993, 161).
Bringing to the surface the textual subconscious the desperate groping of but who decides?
destabilizes referentiality of experience on the one hand, and knowledge on the other; for
decision needs determinacy and determinacy is found to disappear in the quicksand of discourse.
The isolation on a physical island has been replaced by a random, careless existential interior
remove. The erstwhile governor of an unsettled island, Crusoe is now caught between and bored
by the real and uninteresting of this other island, made so because of the post-mortem realities.
So, he can bring himself to offer but a visual approbation to those treasured relics of a life left
behind. Reticent to handle his memorabilia, he whispers, My eyes rest on it and pass on,
because the knife that had once reeked of meaning like a crucifix has no life utility for him
anymore. In fact, the meaning of those things has expired in course of the ceaseless march of
time making them mere uninteresting lumber. In fact, it seems uninteresting only to the selfinterested I. If we subject the poem to an intensive post-structuralist scrutiny, disunity is
revealed on the verbal, the textual, and the linguistic levels. On the verbal plain, the
glittering rollers and the overcast sky construct a visual paradox that on the literal level seems
utterly incompatible with each other. Since an overcast sky causes rapid deterioration of
sunlight, the glitter of the rollers seems optically untenable. But having to live in an
uninhabited island, Crusoe develops a different kind of vision that can easily attribute an

imaginary glitter to the free and moving waves. On the textual level, we come across various
shifts and breaks in the poem that can be said to constitute its fault-lines. Through out the poem
the focus keeps shifting from the birth of the new island to Crusoes life in the uninhabited
island, to Fridays arrival, to their rescue from the island, and ultimately to Crusoes afterlife in
England. Boschman opines that Bishops Crusoe is a solitary observer who meditates for
twenty-eight years on the sea and landscapes of the island where he had formerly been
shipwrecked (Boschman: 2009, 152).
In Crusoe in England, time shifts both backward and forward, enlisting the techniques of flash
back as well as psychic projection. Though all the events described are recounted by Crusoe,
the birth of the new island that sets the narrative ball rolling takes place years after Crusoes
removal from the island. The past that is at once revisited and reconstructed through memory and
representation sometimes comes up to the plain of the present as well. Shifts in tone are also to
be perceived whereby the speaker starts by describing the discovery of a new island as reported
in the newspapers in a satirical vein, light-heartedly talks about fifty two / miserable, small
volcanoes, fondly remembers the relief that the arrival of Friday had given him, mulls over their
rescue from the island with a feeling of nostalgia and ends by lamenting the same rescue on
account of his uninteresting contemporaneity. On the linguistic plain, we come across a few
moments in the poem when the adequacy of language as a viable medium of communication is
itself called into question. The discovery by some ship of an island being born and the fact that
they named it can be cited as two representative cases in point. The birth of the island is seen
by some passing ship, through the mates binoculars and reported in the newspapers. The whole
process is thereby distanced and provisionalized through sight and reportage holding reality to
ransom by representation. The blanks in the poem might have resulted from the kind of books
that Crusoe had read in the island:
Because I didnt know enough.
Why didnt I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
Id read were full of blanks;
the poemswell, I tried reciting to my iris-beds,
In another instance, the textual world of the poem quite like the textual world of the island
reverberates with the questioning shrieks of the gulls and the equivocal replies of the goats:
The island smelled of goat and guano.
The goats were white, so were the gulls,
and both too tame, or else they thought
I was a goat, too, or a gull.
Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek,
baa ... shriek ... baa ...
Here the premodifiers questioning and equivocal at once qualify and render as indeterminate
both the shrieks and the replies respectively; for if the questioning shrieks issue from ignorance
or uncertainty in the questioners mind then the equivocal replies too foregrounds the
unwillingness or the inability of the answerer to proffer definite information or analysis. Crusoes
playing with the names of the volcanoes can be associated with the post-structuralists irreverent
attitude to language:
One billy-goat would stand on the volcano
Id christened Mont dEspoir or Mount Despair
(Id time enough to play with names),

and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.

As a matter of fact, to name is to define, and to define is to mean, whereas to play with names
is to destabilize the signifier/signified correspondence and in short the whole process of
signification.
SQUATTERS CHILDREN
On the unbreathing sides of hills
they play, a specklike girl and boy,
alone, but near a specklike house.
The sun's suspended eye
blinks casually, and then they wade
gigantic waves of light and shade.
A dancing yellow spot, a pup,
attends them. Clouds are piling up;
a storm piles up behind the house.
The children play at digging holes.
The ground is hard; they try to use
one of their father's tools,
a mattock with a broken haft
the two of them can scarcely lift.
It drops and clangs. Their laughter spreads
effulgence in the thunderheads,
weak flashes of inquiry
direct as is the puppy's bark.
But to their little, soluble,
unwarrantable ark,
apparently the rain's reply
consists of echolalia,
and Mother's voice, ugly as sin,
keeps calling to them to come in.
Children, the threshold of the storm
has slid beneath your muddy shoes;
wet and beguiled, you stand among
the mansions you may choose
out of a bigger house than yours,
whose lawfulness endures.
Its soggy documents retain
your rights in rooms of falling rain.
Elizabeth Bishops poem, Squatters Children, is one in a series of poems that Bishop wrote
whilst living in Brazil. Bishop often looked at her world closely and in small parts at a time. In
Bishops collection of poems devoted to Brazil (compiled in Questions of Travel), she is
consistently aware that her eyes are that of a foreigner, yet she is never afraid to see. At times,

Bishop shows that it is through looking at the world closely that we understand it. Other times,
she shows the strikingly opposite: even if we attempt to see it all, we can still remain estranged
and confused. In the case of some of the Brazil poems, this unsettling truth is a commentary on
harsh social realities related to poverty. In Squatters Children, Bishop takes a scene and
elegantly breaks it apart, showing that it is only after you see each part dissected that you realize
that all parts are inseparable. Bishop starts off the poem by taking us On the unbreathing sides
of hills, the hills of the favelas in Rio. We are somewhere unbreathing without life,
suffocated, and still. A sun gazes onto a girl and boy with a suspended eye. The setting speaks
to the unbreathing quality of the hill: the suspension of the sun connotes a sense of fixedness, and
the children, who are in turn alone, are trapped in the suns motionless gaze. This set triangle,
however, is soon to be broken. The sun seems to take in large breaths as it sheds gigantic waves
of light and shade. Other elements begin to quickly appear, reappear and disappear, also like the
very rhythm of breath. But is this movement relieving? Clouds pile up into a storm: they move
closer together, a movement that altogether blocks and caves in closer to the boy and girl. The
children, too, begin to move as they play at digging holes. But the openings they attempt to
make in the ground are impeded the ground is too hard. A similar sense of restraint is felt
when they can scarcely lift the tools they use.
Up until the end of the second stanza, there is no mention of sound. We move from quiet stillness
to quiet movement. We watch in silence. Bishop introduces sound as she did with movement: it
happens like a cascading effect, one movement or sound bumping into and intensifying the next.
Sounds fire off with the drops and clangs of the childrens tools that cause the children to
laugh, in unison with the thunderheads of the storm. The laughter becomes the storm as it
spreads effulgence and strikes weak flashes of inquiry, which are in turn described as direct
as is the puppys bark. The laughter, the storm and the pup together harmonize in a direct but
weak sound. The laughter carries light up into the clouds asking a wordless question. It shoots up
and descends like an unwarrantable ark as clear and visible as the rise and fall of an ark,
however fleeting and weak. It dives back down with no answer, disappearing into the depths of
the ground. Bishops description of this cacophony of sounds is paradoxical: it is strong and clear
yet weak and momentary. It is through capturing the precise qualities and strong impact of
weakness that makes us understand what it is to be weak.
The rain pours out what the storm has swallowed and incorporated the children, the bark, and
the sun and answers the flashes of inquiry with an echo, or rather an echolalia (a word
choice that beautifully mimics the loopy sounds of rain). There is in fact no reply. There are only
the sounds of what is already there, and we are left with the voice of the Mother, which is in turn
as ugly as sin. But is it the childrens mother calling them back inside? Or is it the grander
Mother Nature? This voice nonetheless serves as a sort of rupture: it breaks through this cycle
that has taken place between the sun, the children, the clouds and the rain. The Mother separates
them and draws the children back to where they belong. But there is no dry haven for the
children to escape to. The storm has already seeped into them and slid beneath [their] muddy
shoes. Their homes are seemingly falling apart, as they only have rights in rooms of falling
rain. The alliteration in this last line lends the sense of something tumbling and constant, like
the fall of the rain and the unchanging reality of these children.

We begin the poem in a dry and still place and end in one that is wet and falling apart. The
children are absorbed into their surroundings: their movements, sounds and very existence are
constrained to the lifeless sides of the unbreathing hill.
In Squatters Children, Bishop deals with the homelessness of another. Though the children
technically have a house, it is falling to parts. The childrens bodies do not seem to be situated
within a home, but rather within nature. In Bishops poetry at large, we tend to understand the
human body, however indirectly, through nature. In the poems analyzed thus far, we have come
to understand the poet mainly through the manner in which she perceives and situates herself
within the natural world. Nature, in the Brazil poems, has acted as both home to and enemy of
the human body.
In Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishops narrator explores themes of identity and selfunderstanding through the perspective she gains from discovering the diversity of the world
around her. The speaker undergoes an internal debate as she attempts to answer the questions
immediate to her situation before concluding with an answer as vague as the questions she
ponders in the beginning. By doing so, Bishop, with the employment of imagery, diction,
allusions, and shifts within the structure of the poem, suggests how truly limited in perspective
human experiences are, and, concurrently, how critically important it becomes to widen the
lenses through which we evaluate others in order to promote tolerance and understanding.
BRAZIL, JANUARY 1, 1502 (1960)
embroidered nature tapestried landscape.
- Landscape into Art, by Sir Kenneth Clark
Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs:
every square inch filling in with foliage
big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a satin underleaf turned over;
monster ferns
in silver-gray relief,
and flowers, too, like giant water lilies
up in the airup, rather, in the leaves
purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,
rust red and greenish white;
solid but airy; fresh as if just finished
and taken off the frame.
A blue-white sky, a simple web,
backing for feathery detail:
brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel,

a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;

and perching there in profile, beaks agape,
the big symbolic birds keep quiet,
each showing only half his puffed and padded,
pure-colored or spotted breast.
Still in the foreground there is Sin:
five sooty dragons near some massy rocks.
The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts
splattered and overlapping,
threatened from underneath by moss
in lovely hell-green flames,
attacked above
by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and near,
one leaf yes and one leaf no (in Portuguese).
The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes
are on the small, female one, back-to,
her wicked tail straight up and over,
red as a red-hot wire.
Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, glinting,
in creaking armor, came and found it all,
not unfamiliar:
no lovers walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no lute music,
but corresponding, nevertheless,
to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of style when they left home
wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
LHomme arm or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.
The poems title refers to the day that the Portuguese anchored at Guanabara Bay , Brazil,
and claimed the country as part of their empire. (In 1494, Spain and Portugal had signed the
Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the non-Christian world between them.) Bishop begins her poem
with a quote from Sir Kenneth Clarks Landscape Into Art and goes on to examines the European

perception of nature in this poem about colonial conquest. in, as it occurs in violent sexual
activity, is intimated in the second stanza by five sooty dragons near some massy rocks. They
are lizards who are all eyes for a single female back-to,/her wicked tail straight up and
over,/red as a red-hot wire (34-36). The dragon-shaped lizards pre-figure the Portuguese
conquistadors who will follow the explorers of 1502. It is these (explorers, soldiers, merchants,
missionaries, etc.) Bishop introduces at the beginning of the third stanza. Identified simply as
Christians, Bishop alters the poems dramatic action and tone significantly in this concluding
stanza. What had been an almost bucolic pastoral (albeit in an exotic setting) becomes ominous:
Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting,
in creaking armor, came and found it all . . .
The subject here is ravishment, of the land and of the native peoples, and rape of the women in
particular:
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
LHomme arm or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other . . .
LHomme Arm is a French song widely popular throughout Europe in the fifteenth century. It
was used as the cantus firmus for a number of settings of the Mass. The lyrics, in English,
provide the reader with a further glimpse into the poets attitude toward the Christians:
The man, the man, the armed man
the armed man is to be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That everyone should arm himself with
an iron coat of mail.
Departing Portugal in September 1501, a fleet of Portuguese caravels, under the captaincy of
Femao de Loronha, explored the South American coast. This was the famous second Portuguese
voyage (after Brazil had been explored the year before). As de Loronhas ships sailed into
Guannabara Bay in January 1502, they mistook the large bay for the mouth of a river and
consequently, named the city they planned to build, Rio de Janeiro: River of January. That
January, 452 years earlier, and one of her own, explains Bishops marvelous opening word
Januaries. She is conflating her arrival by ship to the mouth of the Amazon River (on a trip to

the Amazon and to Brasilia with Aldous Huxley and his wife in 1958), with the arrival of the
Portuguese. It is an elegant and dramatic opening:
Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs . . .
Time conflated, the natural world enduring despite the cultural consequences of conquest (at
least at the mouth of the Amazon 53 years ago, but certainly not for the natural environment of
what became the modern city of Rio de Janeiro).
The central conceit is the one Bishop draws from her epigraph. The extravagant lushness and
abundance of the vegetation appears overwrought: every square inch filling in with foliage.
The poet cannot use natural imagery to capture such lavish reality. All of itthe monster
ferns, the flowers, too, like giant water lilies/up in the air must be mediated through art in
order to come to terms. The scene is as fresh as if just finished by the artisan weaver and
taken off the frame. This fits with one of Clarks theses from the book she cites, that tapestry is
decorative and stylized and that landscapes (in any medium) are representations influenced
by artists ideological and personal experiences. The tapestry has a ground upon which it is
woven; only that ground is a blue-white sky which serves as a simple web/backing. The
birds, when they enter the scene, are now big symbolic birds because, deftly, the poets gaze
(and ours following hers) has moved into the [to quote Bishops epigraph from Clark] . . . .
embroidered nature . . . . [a] tapestried landscape. It is so quick and delicate, this shift from the
perceived actual to the imaged ground, from presentation of the thing itself to immersion in
metaphor. This is worth underscoring, I think, because it helps us see why Bishop is esteemed as
a great poet. She carries transformation to the reader through these very subtleties, all conducted
(or choreographed) with the most straightforward diction and in a conversational tone. The
tapestry conceit is advanced with the verb worked in line 26: The rocks are worked with
lichen, gray moonbursts/splattered and overlapping. Then, suggesting that a phrase has been
woven in the tapestry (as if stitched in crewel), the poet regards the scaling-ladder vines that
are descending from the trees to the rocks (attacked from above) as reading, in Portuguese,
one leaf yes and one leaf no. What she is seeing is the alternating leaf formation of the ladder
vines, and I suspect she is recalling a phrase from a nursery room, although I could not locate
this particular alternate phrasing. The diction suggests an unholy atmosphere: Sin, lovely
hell-green flames, her wicked tail and red as a red-hot wire.
The first two-thirds of the poem abound in description of the natural world on the banks of
the river: foliage, flowers, rocks, lichen, birds, and lizards. Color comes to the fore in the poets
perceptions (blue, blue-green, and olive, silver-gray, purple, yellow, two-yellows, pink/rust
red and greenish white,, then red twice in a single line. Color would overwhelm the poem if
the poet had not kept her inner camera panning (for this is, among other qualities, a filmic poem).

All color stops when the Christians enter the poem. They have texture and size and they
glint in their metal armor, and although they must have been quite miserable in the summer heat
of the southern hemispheres January, the poets attitude toward them is merciless. They are
tiny and hard as nails, and seem full of themselves as they march along humming their song
about armed men being feared. By bringing the Mass into the poem, Bishop suggests that
hypocritical nature of 16th century Catholicism which strove to bring salvation to native peoples
while failing to condemn the inhuman exploitation, pillage, and rape conducted by their brethen.
Bishops Christians pray one moment, then the next take off after those maddening little
women who they considered theirs for the taking.
In lines 41 through 45, Bishop presents a glimpse of an idealized romantic life of a Renaissance
courtier, the world the conquistadors have left behind. She gives us a scene that may have been
represented on tapestries. The imagery comprised an old dream of wealth and luxury that
included lovers walks through garden bowers, the two lovers stopping to pick and feed one
another cherries while being followed by a strolling musician playing the lute a conventional
idyll. Bishop claims that this new world was not entirely unfamiliar to the Christians, that in
its very lavishness, it is somehow comparable: corresponding, nevertheless,/to an old dream of
wealth and luxury/already of out style when they left home . . .
In Brazil, January 1, 1502, Bishop describes the colonization of Brazil: Just so the
Christians, hard as nails, tiny as nails, and glinting, in creaking armor came and found it all,
(92). The Christians are described as hard and in armor. They exploit the native people and
land. For the Christian colonizers Brazil represents an old dream of wealth and luxury and a
perhaps undefined brand-new pleasure. (92). This brand new pleasure to which Bishop
refers is not entirely clear, but may be rape. The lines after brand new pleasure seem to suggest
such a reading: Directly after mass, humming perhaps/ LHomme arme or some such tune, they
ripped away into the hanging fabric, each out to catch an Indian for himself- (92). The fabric
into which the Christians are ripping refers back to the Sir Kenneth Clark quote before the
beginning of the poem in which Clark refers to a landscape as embroidered nature tapestried
landscape (91). The image of the Christians ripping into nature and catching an Indian woman
is a strong one. The Christians are described as being armored while the Indian women are
compared to birds: those maddening little women who kept calling,/ calling to each other (or
had the birds waked up?)/ and retreating, always retreating, behind it. (92) The Indian women
are mistaken for birds by the speaker, which might point to an issue of communication. The
Christians more than likely could not understand the native languages, which could certainly be
maddening. The Indian women are also said to be retreating behind it. The it they are
retreating behind referring to the hanging fabric which the Christians are ripping into. It is
clear in this poem whom has the power. The Christians come into an unknown land and treat the
native people like animals. They view them as second class. The armored Christians are too
powerful for the Indians. A modern day reader would of course already know this. However, this
poem is important because it reminds the reader of the ugly way in which Brazil was colonized.

The colonization of Brazil created social classes that would last for quite sometime and are still
to some extent in existence. All over Latin America Indian looking people are treated as second
class to this day. It is also important that the Christians catching Indians comes right after mass.
Perhaps Bishop is making some commentary on how people can do bad things in the name of
religion. Similar themes reoccur in much of Bishops work. Bishop is an observational poet, thus
it only seems natural that her work touch upon issues of class and social division as it does in
Brazil, January 1, 1502.

Brazil, January 1, 1502 gives us a classic case of militarism and colonization from the 16th
century. The prolonged stay in Brazil left a profound mark on Bishops poetic sensibility.
Already with the postmodern times and the postcolonial reality, she could easily identify with the
spirit of the land, thanks to the colonial past that the United States shared with Brazil. Bishop
focuses in her Brazil poems on a densely textured intersection of race, class and gender
ideologies and foregrounds the politics of colonialism and colonial conquest of the New World.
In fact, as Robert Boschman has shown us, Brazil January 1, 1502 implies a loss of the sense
of current, civilized time as the speaker takes an imaginative excursion over four centuries into
the past to envision the first Portuguese conquistadors encounter with the Amazon rainforest and
its native inhabitants In Brazil, January 1, 1502, the poet gives a full expression to a multilayered dispersal of perceptions and perspectives that her postmodern sensibility brought into the
description of a postcolonial scene. That postcolonial in this context refers to the time of
intersection between the colonial discourse and the colonized subjectivity comes to the fore in
Bishops choice of the title. In fact, Brazil, January 1, 1502 is at once a physical and discoursal
space caught in the temporal stasis of a date as also in the spatial confines of a country:
embroidered nature tapestried landscape (CP 91).
Bishops reference to Januaries merges the time of the European colonization in the 16th century
with that of the American tourists observation in the twentieth century. But, though Nature
might have revealed herself to both the conquistadors and the poetic persona in the exactly
similar manner, their perceptions, thanks to their different perspectives (if we are prepared to
overlook changes wrought by time), must have been different.
Bishops visual poetics in its proliferent elasticity now disperses the act of sight into the wide
spectrum of subject-positions from Nature to the conquistadors to the colonized. At a later stage,
however, the poetic surface transfers itself from the poet to the readers by way of a postmodern
diffusion of the narrative:
Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs:
every square inch filling in with foliage
big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
Lionel Kelly opines, To put January in the plural immediately posits multiplicity; and we know
Nature cannot greet anyone, unless they are anthropomorphizing their environment (Kelly:
61). It is quite plausible that both the Portuguese conquistadors and the visiting poet
anthropomorphized their environment. However, their motives for such anthropomorphization
must have been different; for while the conquistadors wanted a pretext for plunder, Bishop
needed a context for her critique thereof. The European colonizers came to Brazil with the
purpose of pillage and brought with them the assumptions of their socio-religion-literary culture.
So, they tried to assess and judge the landscape on the basis of their preconceptions. The jungle
of the real Brazil did not tally with the bower they had envisioned. But it was for this very reason
that they forced the real to fit the ideal, trying to read the old world into the new. As the pillage
of the colony coincided with the rape of the indigenous women, the project acquired obvious
sexual implications. What prompts the poet to associate herself in this game of vision is that her
own possession of Brazil, as Helen Vendler points out, she [Bishop] suspects, has something in
it not unlike the plunder and rape of the conquistadors, who came hard as nails, / tiny as nails,

and glinting / in creaking armour to the New World, a tapestry of vegetative and human
attraction (Vendler: 1987, 832).
Bishop gives a free reign to her poetic imagination in re-creating the scene of colonization:
Directly after the Mass, humming perhaps
LHomme arme or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.
The references to the Mass and the Hymn connect the politico-economic project of
colonization to the religious project of Christian evangelism. As a result, the surveyed scene of
tropical opulence gets superimposed with a post-lapserian Eden where nature becomes indicative
of the original sin rather than with any creative vitality. Ideological navet allows the
conquistadors to gloss over their own lasciviousness under the guise of bringing Christian
salvation to those maddening little women. The conquistadors equate these maddening little
women to birds and lizards; for the exotic and erotic charms of those women madden them.
That maddening as a signifier is a product of the conquistadors gaze and not that of the
womens design may problematize the male privilege of inspection and judgment. Here
Bishops poetry, as Angus Cleghorn has suggested, enacts animification as opposed to
personification and in doing so she reveals her awareness that colonialism past and present
prevent those visiting Brazil from ever capturing the native place. As per the postcolonial
discourse, the chased women create a community that seeks to resist the colonizing project of
homogenization. The strategy they adopt is twofold. First and foremost, they subtract
themselves from the colonial discourse by stepping out of the picture (tapestry) and going behind
it. Secondly, they shatter the at once auditory and ideological silence of the colonizers discourse
by waking up the big symbolic birds (the colonized communities) to unite and fight back this
ideological domination. The perception of the Europeans was formed and framed by what their
individual and group interests. So, the work of art (tapestry) that they made was sure to reflect
this partial view. This sequence of causality may lead us to the slippery path of reality,
representation, and knowledge. Since, all reality is representational in nature, and all
representation makes knowledge ideological and then therefore provisional, connects this poem
to the postmodern materiality of conundrum and contingency.