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yearned for the familiarities of life in England, so at the end of the
poem he yearns for the restoration of the numinous quality that his
knife, flute, shoes, and trousers possessed when they were essential
to survival. But the  living soul of his knife  has dribbled away,
and along with the other artifacts of his remote island culture, it is
being left to the local museum. The poem ends by evoking a sense
of resignation to the frustrations of nostalgia, lamenting Friday s
death in an embittered aside that separates their relationship from the
inventory of artifacts to emphasize the special poignance of the loss.
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CRITICAL VIEWS ON
 Crusoe in England
BISHOP ON CRUSOE S RELATION TO FRIDAY
[In the following excerpt from one of Bishop s letters (written
April 20, 1974) to her friend and fellow poet James Merrill,
she discusses her revision of the crucial passage in which
Crusoe describes Friday s arrival.]
No, I am very glad you wrote what you did about  Crusoe [in
England]. I don t get much criticism, perhaps because of my gray
hairs (or else just nasty remarks, like James Dickey s) and I m
really grateful. Actually, there was quite a lot more in the last two or
three parts of that poem. Then I decided that it was growing boring
(this may be one bad effect of giving  readings  the fear of bor-
ing), and that the poem should be speeded up toward the end and not
give too many more details so I cut it quite a lot the rescue to one
line, etc. If I can find the original ms. here (under the ping-pong
table, no doubt) I might be able to put back a few lines about Friday.
I still like  poor boy  because he was a lot younger; and because
they couldn t  communicate (ghastly word) much. Crusoe guesses
at Friday s feelings but I think you are right and I ll try to restore
or add a few lines there before the piece gets to a book. In fact, now
that I think of it, I can almost remember 2 or 3 lines after  we were
friends  that s where something is needed, probably.
 Elizabeth Bishop, One Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1994): pp. 584.
HELEN VENDLER ON THE THEME OF DOMESTICITY
[Helen Vendler writes frequently on contemporary poetry and
teaches at Harvard University. Her publications include
acclaimed studies of Keats, Yeats, George Herbert, Wallace
Stevens, and Shakespeare s sonnets in addition to several
book-length collections of her reviews and essays. In the fol-
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lowing extract, Vendler examines the relationship between
domesticity and companionship in  Crusoe in England. ]
Elizabeth Bishop s poems in Geography III put into relief the con-
tinuing vibration of her work between two frequencies the domes-
tic and the strange. In another poet the alternation might seem a
debate, but Bishop drifts rather than divides, gazes rather than
chooses. Though the exotic is frequent in her poems of travel, it is
not only the exotic that is strange and not only the local that is
domestic. (It is more exact to speak, with regard to Bishop, of the
domestic rather than the familiar, because what is familiar is always
named, in her poetry, in terms of a house, a family, someone beloved,
home. And it is truer to speak of the strange rather than of the exot-
ic, because the strange can occur even in the bosom of the familiar,
even, most unnervingly, at the domestic hearth.) (. . .)
Domesticity is frail, and it is shaken by the final strangeness of
death. Until death, and even after it, the work of domestication of the
unfamiliar goes on, all of it a substitute for some assurance of tran-
scendent domesticity, some belief that we are truly, in this world, in
our mother s house, that  somebody loves us all. After a loss that
destroys one form of domesticity, the effort to reconstitute it in
another form begins. The definition of death in certain of Bishop s
poems is to have given up on domesticating the world and reestab-
lishing yet once more some form of intimacy. Conversely, the defi-
nition of life in the conversion of the strange to the familial, of the
unexplored to the knowable, of the alien to the beloved. (. . .)
The whole cycle of domestication and loss can be seen in the long
monologue,  Crusoe in England. Crusoe is safely back in England,
and his long autobiographical retrospect exposes in full clarity the
imperfection of the domestication of nature so long as love is miss-
ing, the exhaustion of solitary colonization. (. . .)
Crusoe s efforts at the domestication of nature (making a flute,
distilling home brew, even devising a dye out of red berries) create a
certain degree of pleasure ( I felt a deep affection for/the smallest of
my island industries ), and yet the lack of any society except that of
turtles and goats and waterspouts ( sacerdotal beings of glass . . . /
Beautiful, yes, but not much company ) causes both self-pity and a
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barely admitted hope. Crusoe, in a metaphysical moment, christens
one volcano  Mont d Espoir or Mount Despair, mirroring both his
desolation and his expectancy. The island landscape has been
domesticated,  home-made, and yet domestication can turn to
domesticity only with the arrival of Friday:  Just when I thought I
couldn t stand it / another minute longer, Friday came. Speechless
with joy, Crusoe can speak only in the most vacant and consequent-
ly the most comprehensive of words. (. . .)
Love escapes language. Crusoe could describe with the precision
of a geographer the exact appearances of volcanoes, turtles, clouds,
lava, goats, and waterspouts and waves, but he is reduced to gesture
and sketch before the reality of domesticity.
In the final, recapitulatory movement of the poem Bishop first
reiterates the conferral of meaning implicit in the domestication of
the universe and then contemplates the loss of meaning once the
arena of domestication is abandoned.
 Helen Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980): pp. 97, 101, 105 106.
JOANNE FEIT DIEHL ON THE EMERSONIAN SUBLIME
[Joanne Feit Diehl has taught at the University of California,
Davis and is the author of Dickinson and the Romantic
Imagination (1981) and Women Poets and the American
Sublime (1990). In the extract that follows Diehl sets Bishop in
the tradition of the Emersonian Sublime and compares her
negotiation of its gender-specific roles to that of Emily
Dickinson.]
Separated as she is from Dickinson both by time and temperament,
Elizabeth Bishop nonetheless faces an allied if somewhat extenuat-
ed version of the Emersonian Sublime, and, once again, the crux of
the poetic problem relates to gender. But Bishop, even more than
Dickinson, defends against the challenge to her poetic autonomy by
ursurping the very terms in which it is made. In other words, Bishop
compensates for the recognition of her loss of poetic authority in
Emersonian terms by an erasure of the sexual dialectic upon which
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