1Oceans always exerted a powerful attraction on Elizabeth Bishop for they represent inscrutable and antithetic depths, both perfectly transparent and totally opaque (“cold dark deep and absolutely clear” [ “At the Fishhouses” CP 65]). Bishop once compared herself to a “sandpiper” “just running along the edges of different countries and continents, ‘looking for something’” (1977 12). Edges as liminal areas were among her privileged spaces, where she could develop her favorite peripheral stance. Opening onto a horizon, the ocean is associated with immensity and with the invisible. Indeed, the horizon is the ultimate line beyond which vision is not possible anymore, but also the frontier between one’s perceptible world and countless other possible worlds.2 Living on an island, one is surrounded by this fertile threshold. Moreover, as Bishop wrote in her 1934 notebook when she discovered the Massachusetts island of Cuttyhunk, living on an island forces one to adapt oneself:

On an island, you live all the time in this Robinson Crusoe atmosphere; making this do for that, and contriving, and inventing… A poem should be made about making things in a pinch… The idea of making things do (of using things in unthought of ways because it’s necessity) has a lot more to it. It is an island feeling, certainly.3

2Reflecting upon island feelings, Bishop immediately thought of Robinson Crusoe and her idea of writing her own version of the myth probably dates back to that early period. The poem centers on the question of how to survive in the absence of known landmarks and in the absence of others. But beyond this, it also develops the theme of creation, suggesting that creation is always a question of invention and redefinition of limits and categories, especially the categories of difference and sameness, strangeness and familiarity. Since Bishop explored such issues throughout her whole career, “Crusoe in England” can be studied as a late poem that enabled her once more to approach these themes.

3Her poem is a revision of Defoe’s story. Bishop said that rereading Defoe’s book, she discovered how “really awful” it was, and that she wanted to “resee” it all with the Christianity left out (Monteiro 88). Conversely, she may have been influenced by Michel Tournier’s French version Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, which was published in France in 1967 and translated into English soon after,4 at the moment when Bishop was working on her own Crusoe. Though she never mentioned the book, she’s likely to have been aware of it.

4Through Crusoe’s narration of his own story, the island can first be studied as “Mount Despair,” that is to say a mysterious and deceptive space that baffles Crusoe and arouses his melancholy nostalgia for his past environment and habits. But the intimate and erotic relationship he manages to establish with this elusive land soon turns it into a “Mont d’Espoir” that offers the exile new possibilities of behaving and being. The island is gradually transformed into a haven of invention and creation before it eventually becomes Crusoe’s “true country” to quote Flannery O’Connor (27), whom Bishop admired so much. It is the place he is paradoxically homesick for when he finds himself back on his native land. His trajectory from exile to homecoming is not exactly what one would expect and it may recall Bishop’s own surprising course in poetry.

5Uprootedness is one of the poem’s focal issues. The island is an evasive landscape, in its proportions (the volcanoes are “miserably small” and Crusoe has become a giant), its vegetation (it has only one kind of tree and berry) and its sounds (the whole place keeps hissing). Its strangeness cannot be turned into something familiar. Crusoe mostly deals with uncertainties and interrogations: “My island seemed to be/a sort of cloud-dump.” (29-30, my emphasis); “Was that why it rained so much?” (34). He often resorts to domestic similes, attempting to reduce the unknown aspects of the place to well-known realities: for instance, the turtles hiss “like teakettles” (37). He also tries to treat the island as his possession, in his speech first of all (“my poor old island,” 8; “Well, I had fifty-two/ […] volcanoes,” 11-12), then in some of his actions or thoughts: he starts counting the volcanoes (16) from a higher perspective, he dreams that his function is to register the island’s flora, fauna, and geography (140-141). His attempts at appropriation are reminiscent of the dominating attitude of Defoe’s hero, who accomplished a complete colonization of the new territory on which he was shipwrecked: from geographic control to religious, social and political empire. Defoe’s Crusoe was involved in a process of evangelisation, being a crusader as the etymology of his name indicates. The land he discovered was gradually tamed. But Bishop’s persona clearly rejects the literary model: “None of the books has ever got it right” (10). Her Crusoe’s attempts to master the place all fail.

6The poem opens on the image of an erupting volcano, which brings to mind the photographs the child stares at in the preceding poem in the collection, “In the Waiting-Room” (CP 159-161): “the inside of a volcano, /black and full of ashes;/then it was spilling over/in rivulets of fire” (17-20). The volcano’s eruption stands for the child’s destabilization. When looking at the spilling over fire and lava and simultaneously facing the oddness of African women and of her aunt’s cry, the child feels carried away in a metaphoric maelstrom of strangeness that erases the limits between herself and others (“the sensation of falling off/the round, turning world/into cold, blue-dark space,” 57-59). She has to experience a vertigo which is echoed to a certain extent by Crusoe’s experience: landing on an unknown island that keeps evading his efforts at domestication, Crusoe is mostly shaken in his reasoning capacities. The very act of thinking reactivates the impression of a whirling world:

I’d 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 couldn’t 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. (18-28)

7His speech, which initially sounds like an attempt to better understand the island and his own situation, is structured like a demonstration with transitions, hypotheses and consequences. But the conclusion he logically reaches is alarming: his usual landmarks are totally disrupted by the weirdness of the place. When trying to make sense of a puzzling situation, Crusoe only manages to confirm the utter difference of the land. He realizes that he has entered a new universe with its own dimensions and its own rules. The objects affected by changes of proportions are juxtaposed (“the goats and turtles, or the gulls, or the rollers”) as if the list had no end. The description of the rollers, through its repetitions (“closing and closing in, glittering and glittering”), revives the sensation of uncontrollable pace. The voice has to face a threat of proliferation, added to the latent fear of being overwhelmed by a powerful and endless series of waves. The overcast sky seems to function as a cap or a lid, corroborating the impression of an enclosed and pressurized space from which the persona cannot escape. In that perspective, the horizon can also be understood as a circular limit that cuts the island off from the rest of the universe. It is mentioned on line 7 for the first time and is clearly compared to a trap: “a black fleck […] was caught on the horizon like a fly.” The voice seems caught in contradictory dynamics, both centripetal and centrifugal, similar to those created by a spiral (the image of the spiral is present in the poem through the reference to waterspouts [53]). Crusoe’s reasoning leads him to the conclusion that it is impossible for him to think anymore (“I couldn’t bear to think”).

8In the essay entitled “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui,” which he wrote as a commentary on Tournier’s novel, Gilles Deleuze described Crusoe’s island as a world deprived of depth since it is a world deprived of any human presence. The other, like the horizon, guarantees the existence of contiguities, the possibility for other perspectives on the world and, therefore, the possibility for its complexity and its depth. If the other disappears, nothing is left but according to Deleuze’s expressions, “absolute distances,” “absolute differences” or “unbearable repetitions.”5 This is partly the definition of the world in which Bishop’s Crusoe finds himself (a world of flatness and oneness: “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” (65). The “impoverished scenery” is described with impoverished monosyllabic words. Crusoe is confronted to loneliness and symmetry: “there was one of it and one of me.” In this reflexive process, the threat of vertiginous duplication and multiplication looms once again: “I’d have/nightmares of other islands/stretching away from mine, infinities/of islands, islands spawning islands, /like frog’s eggs turning into polliwogs/of islands” (133-138). As Tournier puts it, the island has become an “absolute unknown” or an “inscrutable night.”6 It is a threatening place where Crusoe feels uprooted and foreign. He is fed up with the monotony of its colors, the gulls’ shrieks are painful and enervating. He dreams of temperate weather and temperate vegetation, longing for “real shade” and “real tea.” His nostalgia can only be partly relieved by the intercession of his memory and imagination that momentarily bring him back to his native land.

9Far from Defoe’s domineering and willful settler, Bishop’s Crusoe experiences melancholy (he feels “self-pity” and takes to drinking in order to forget his awful destiny). In that respect, he is still much closer to Tournier’s hero who lets himself gradually slide into a state of regression he calls “la souille” (a kind of “grubbiness”), relinquishing his ability to lead a structured social life and recovering his primal status as a beast. The situation echoes “The Prodigal” (CP 71), a poem that stages another exile who lives in a dirty place, among pigs, almost becoming one of them. After this temporary exclusion, the prodigal son re-integrates the human sphere: “But it took him a long time/finally to make his mind up to go home” (27-28). So does Bishop’s Crusoe.

10The horizon can symbolically be read as an enclosing frontier, or, conversely, as an absence of limits. It is the line that opens the world onto otherness and infinite possibilities. When the baby goat’s pupils narrow up horizontally (122), Crusoe faces a puzzling phenomenon. The expression of malice that he notices remains ambiguous because the word malice can be polysemic (especially if we take into account Crusoe’s ability to play with languages): is it synonymous with wickedness, as in English, or mischievousness, as in French? The scene also reminds us of the last stanza of “The Man-Moth” (CP 14):

If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. (40-44)

11The eye is turning into a horizon that evades the person who is trying to seize it. But this line of depth and blackness eventually produces a tear “pure enough to drink” (48): it is both an expression of grief and a gift of life. Similarly, the island’s evasiveness proves painful and fruitful at the same time, which may remind us of an early dynamic in Bishop’s poetry: her first poems are often “fables of enclosure” (Travisano 17) staging personae who refuse to face the encounter with otherness that life imposes on them. When confronted to foreignness, either in their relationship to a mutable world they cannot grasp, or foreignness to themselves (especially through the intercession of the unconscious and dreams), or even distance to language which can no longer be taken as a tool in mastery either, these melancholy figures take refuge in introspection and stasis, thus only enhancing the discordance that separates them from the world and from themselves. These dreams of solipsism are even clearly associated with danger and death: think of the traveller in “The Imaginary Iceberg” (CP 4), “The Unbeliever” (CP 22), or the persona in “The Weed” (CP 20-21), whose immobility is shaken by the intrusion of the plant, a symbol of otherness and strangeness that first brings grief but is then grafted onto the “I” to make it fruitful. George Herbert, who inspired Elizabeth Bishop for this poem, similarly used to play on the paranomasia between grief and greffe in French/graft in English7 (a sharp blade of grass eventually meaning grace.) However painful it may be, uprootedness is a necessary step for any creative process to be launched.

12This is why I would like to study now how Crusoe’s Mount Despair becomes a Mont d’Espoir, that is to say a locus of desire and creation. Throughout the poem, the scenery is repeatedly presented as a living body. The initial image is that of “an island being born” (3), in a “breath” of steam (4). The volcanoes are described as standing up, “naked, with their heads blown off” (16-17). Craters have “parched throats” (32). Waterspouts are endowed with heads and feet (52). And, more interestingly, the island’s body is covered with various layers: “folds of lava” (40) and snails or snail shells seem to drape the place like yards of material. Crusoe, therefore, cannot see beyond the thickness of these metaphorical garments; he literally cannot dis-cover the landscape, just as the voice in “Cape Breton” (CP 67- 68) cannot reach the meaning of the islands of Ciboux and Hertford because they are hidden by “folds and folds of fir, spruce and hackmatack” (18), or the voice in “At the Fishhouses” (CP 65) cannot unveil the secret of a scenery whose fish tubs are “completely lined/with layers of beautiful herring scales” (21-22) and whose wheelbarrows are “similarly plastered/with creamy iridescent coats of mail” (23-24). Crusoe’s wish to caress the craters cannot be fulfilled because they are too hot. The waterspouts made of intangible “scuffed-up white” (50) cannot be seized either: they “come and go, advancing and retreating” (48). This intermittent process of presence and absence, proximity and distance may symbolize the hide-and-seek game the whole island seems to be playing with its human visitor, arousing his frustration but also his desire to get closer to it. Roland Barthes defined intermittence as an erotic process.8 The persona’s longing for contact is also perceptible in this passage: “Beautiful, yes, but not much company” (54), the inserted “yes” sounding like a sigh. The whole place hisses like a teakettle (35)—or maybe like a snake. Constantly eluding those who try to catch it, it may epitomize temptation. Crusoe develops a very sensual relationship to the island. The discovery of the territory requires the use of his five senses, and the memory he keeps of some objects is also laden with physical and sensuous connotations. For instance, he speaks of the knife as he would of his former contacts with a lover’s body: “I knew each nick and scratch by heart, /the bluish blade, the broken tip, /the lines of wood-grain on the handle…” (165-167).

13Crusoe’s erotic relationship to the island is emphasized by his attraction to Friday. The story of Friday’s arrival is not told. Neither are the circumstances of their departure, contained in the one line stanza: “And then one day they came and took us off” (153). These ellipses in the plot are echoed by several blanks concerning Crusoe’s relationship to his companion:

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.
He’d pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
 — Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body. (145- 152)

14 When he read the poem for the first time, James Merrill found these lines too enigmatic. He saw them as a turning in the poem “where something seem[ed] to wobble unintentionally.”9 In her answer, Bishop sounded willing to take Merrill’s criticism into account, but she remained very vague as to what could be added.10 She never modified the poem. Lorrie Goldensohn analysed these lines as “muted, deadened and repetitive baby speech” indicating the “burden of unacknowledgeable feeling” (77), namely homoerotic desire. Although Crusoe’s desire is never explicitly formulated, it is made palpable through several stylistic devices: the use of anaphora, the exclamation and the dash convey Crusoe’s emotion, his longing for companionship and physical contact. He focuses on Friday’s body and clearly expresses his wish to “propagate his kind” (Friday is seen as a mother figure to the baby goats). The expression of Crusoe’s desire may be all the stronger as it is simply hinted at and not stated bluntly. One may recognize here the pleasure Bishop took in telling things obliquely. Like Crusoe and the island, she often involved her readers in a hide-and-seek game. Withdrawal was always best for Bishop to preserve her own intimacy and to perpetuate her readers’ pleasure in conjectures and surprises. The peripheral style she defended as one of her favourite poetic strategies was not merely a sign of her incapacity to express forbidden and more or less “shameful” emotions. It was also a way of turning each poem into a locus of desire, a locus of evasiveness and momentary “coalescence” (Costello 109).

15 Crusoe’s painful relationship to the place gradually turns into seduction and complicity. When looking at the snail shells that cover the ground, he sees “beds of irises” that can be understood as an infinity of coloured eyes staring at him. The island seems inhabited by a multitude of beings whose presence puts an end to Crusoe’s solitude. The island mostly teaches Crusoe “how to make things do,” how to use things in “unthought of” ways. The island in all its otherness forces Crusoe to leave his preconceived ideas behind. The island teaches him to see things from new perspectives, hence to think differently. Like Defoe’s hero, Bishop’s Crusoe carries out a few experiments. His attempts sound like a chemist’s cautious and meticulous program: “I tried it, one by one, and hours apart./Sub-acid, not bad, no ill-effects;/and so I made home-brew” (77-79). But his aim is not scientific at all: this Crusoe is only trying to get inebriated, whereas his literary predecessor kept imposing his traditional ways of experimenting onto the new land in order to transform it into a useful environment. Crusoe’s intoxication may help him forget his situation but it also enhances his creative capacities: instead of looking for profit, Bishop’s protagonist is mostly interested in increasing his own delight. For instance, he makes odd and “useless” instruments (a flute with “the weirdest scale on earth” [83]). Besides, he cannot resort to his previous knowledge, since it is deficient: “He does not know enough” (90). The blanks in the books he once read prove useful in the sense that they prevent Crusoe from considering himself a tragic hero: because he cannot take Greek drama for a model, he cannot think that his fate was decided long ago by some all-powerful divinity. His Christian resignation (“Do I deserve this? I suppose I must” [56]) is quickly reversed into a rejection of divine providence: God may not after all be hidden behind all events. In which case Crusoe’s plight is not predetermined and he can claim his right to self-determination: “Was there a moment when I actually chose this?/I don’t remember, but there could have been.” (57-58). His failing memory also prevents him from remembering (and thus having to face) his “solitude,” which is the missing word in Wordsworth’s poem. No wonder he cannot remember a romantic poem that was written in the nineteenth century, since Robinson Crusoe is supposed to be an eighteenth century character. This anachronism can be read as further proof of the humour of Bishop’s persona. His humour also lies in his ability to manipulate language, in his deformation of proverbs for instance: “Pity should begin at home. So the more/pity I felt, the more I felt at home” (63-64). Under the guise of a syllogism, Crusoe leads a new kind of demonstration in which the self-pity he evokes is not a lamentation but a way of making the place feel more comfortable.

16This attitude based on oblivion and distance also evokes the one Bishop always recommended as far as travel and life were concerned, but also about the writing of poetry. The Portuguese settlers had a predatory kind of vision firmly condemned in “Brazil, January 1, 1502” (CP 91-92). The observation Bishop advocated was Charles Darwin’s way of looking at things, that is to say a disinterested and oblivious stance that enabled him to merrily slide “into the unknown”11 and be more inventive in the end thanks to this very act of self-dispossession.

17As a universe in constant motion, the island conjures up illusions and mirages. After having been bewildered, Crusoe is bewitched. The variations in proportions he witnesses turn the island into a wonderland. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Crusoe has to constantly adapt to new dimensions— something Bishop herself loved to practice in her poems. See the working table transformed into a strange country in “12 O’Clock News” (CP 174- 175), or a chandelier becoming the Place de la Concorde in “Sleeping on the Ceiling” (CP 29), or urban settings seen as glittering bodies in “From the Country to the City” (CP 13) and “Night City” (CP 167). Like Crusoe, she loved to recover her child-like naïve vision—her “infant sight” (CP 59)— which often enabled her to transform perplexity into fertile wonder.

18Living on the island consists in rediscovering and renaming it day after day. Crusoe’s motto could be Octavio Paz’s lines translated by Bishop which I’ve chosen as my title: “Tomorrow we shall have to invent/once more/the reality of this world.” Through this process of constant invention, Crusoe becomes the creator of his own fate, which is the third and last aspect of his trajectory I would like to develop. Because it is a constant process of revision, Crusoe’s life is based on openness, acceptance and adaptability. His exile teaches him to question all established principles, among which religious and social codes. Traces of religion are still perceptible in the similes he chooses to describe his new way of life: the waterspouts move like “sacerdotal beings” (52), the knife looks “like a crucifix” (162). Objects have become his companions and the whole universe is alive. His new “miserable philosophy” (89) seems to partake of animism. The body is central to this new creed whose rituals are sensuous. The new religion also implies the acceptance of a certain porosity between various spheres. On the island, materials keep being transformed. In the waterspouts, water first appears under the guise of glass before becoming smoke. Snails creep over trees, like some vegetation. Shells look like flowers or eyes. In this metamorphic world, the limits between different beings or elements have disappeared. The porosity between dreams and real life is also extreme: “I’d dream of things/like slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it/for a baby goat" (131-133). The play on words and sounds, typical of dreams, is reiterated and developed in daytime: “One day I dyed a baby goat bright red/with my red berries, just to see/something a little different./And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him” (125-128). The verb “dyed” can be read as “died,” which would mean the symbolic accomplishment of the baby goat’s death he had dreamt of, the animal being coloured bright red as if it were covered in blood. These lines also show that after being a victim of unstable landmarks, Crusoe is now able to himself blur the limits between the familiar and the strange, to turn the known into “something different.” He cannot master his new land (and doesn’t even seek to do so), but has become a master of transitions—between awfulness and cheerfulness, dream and reality, strangeness and familiarity, and between languages as well. His creativity precisely lies in these fluctuations. As a perpetual exile, Crusoe does not need rest but motion. As the weed grows to divide the persona’s heart, so Crusoe has to undergo the everyday shaking and erasure of his standards. His nomadism consists in questioning and reinventing even his own self. His exclamatory question “‘Home-made, homemade!’ But aren’t we all?” (85) is a crucial assessment at the core of the poem. Every day, Crusoe practices “the art of losing” his former identity (another example of self-dispossession) in order to create a new one so that even the animals think he has become one of them: “they thought/I was a goat, too, or a gull./Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, /baa… shriek… baa…” (102-105). The onomatopoeias are inserted among Crusoe’s words, as if they were part of his own speech and language. The “questioning shrieks” and “equivocal replies” (107) may also define Crusoe’s very relationship to the island, only made of interrogations and uncertain answers.

19The English reality he was longing for on his arrival in this foreign territory has become less attractive than the new reality he builds up and destroys day after day. His “homemade brew” is much more delectable that “real” tea (159), and whooping and dancing in the sun with goats is more pleasurable than resting in “real shade” (114). Indeed, once he is back in England, Crusoe finds a place of destruction. Friday dies of a western disease a short time after his coming to Europe. Crusoe describes himself as old and lifeless. His former belongings, which used to “reek with meaning,” are also deprived of life: the shoes are “shrivelled” (173), the goatskin trousers are half eaten by moths (174-175), and the parasol ironically looks like a “plucked and skinny fowl” (179). The local museum would like to gather those items in order to commemorate Crusoe’s history as if it were already part of some very distant past. The precious knife has undergone the same fate: “Now he won’t look at me at all./The living soul has dribbled away./My eyes rest on it and pass on” (168-170). These lines sound like the end of a passionate love affair. The knife’s incapacity to look at Crusoe is paralleled by Crusoe’s failure to look at the world. His eyes seem to glide on surfaces, no longer able to reach any depth, to establish contact, even less intimacy. Crusoe’s secluded and bored life in England resembles the nightmare of a solitary existence deprived of the presence of others, “the inscrutable night” of death described by Deleuze. What Crusoe feared so much on the foreign island is encountered at home. Although England does not look like an island, it produces the worst effects one would expect from such a cut-off space. From England, even the blessed territory, which used to be full of movement, noise and changes is affected by immobility and decay: “They named it. But my poor old island’s still/un-rediscovered, un-renamable” (8-9). The adverb “still,” isolated by the run-on-line, sounds like an adjective, thus revealing the island’s deadly fixity. The privative prefixes deny the island’s identity—its very existence is negated.

20In England, Crusoe longs for the unstable and surprising life he had on the island. Its “variegated” scenery and the variegated experience it would offer were his haven: “The beaches were all lava, variegated, /black, red, and white, and gray;/the marbled colors made a fine display” (43-45). This passage is reminiscent of the concluding lines in “The End of March” (CP 179-180): “The sun came out for just a minute./For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand, /the drab, damp, scattered stones/were multi-colored” (53-56). In this poem written under the influence of Wallace Stevens, the prismatic beauty of the landscape can be interpreted as the world’s radiating quality once the poet’s imagination has played with it. For as Stevens put it: “The pleasure that the poet has is a pleasure of agreement with the radiant and productive world in which he lives” (678). Imagination or invention (working mostly on analogies) “colors and increases” reality through refracting processes.12 The harshness and dullness of reality thus give way to warmth and light. Although the island is not Crusoe’s world in the beginning,13 it becomes his home. No wonder he feels “island-sick” like the cattle (115) in England. The limit between “home” and “not home” has been so confused that the two categories are reversed. As a place of loss, instability and invention, the foreign land becomes a nest—a metaphor Bishop developed in “Jerónimo’s House” (CP 34) or “Santarém” (CP 185-187) for instance to refer to the temporary houses she kept squatting in, that is to say her poems. For Crusoe’s mutable identity also fits her definition of a poet’s “sense of home” as being what he carries with him, as frail as a snail’s shell (the whole island is covered with these) or as ephemeral as a snake’s shedding skin (Crusoe’s trousers are precisely described as “shedding”).

21In “Questions of Travel” (CP 93-94), Bishop’s poetic voice asks itself: “Home, /wherever that may be?” (66-67) In “Crusoe in England,” the persona seems to wonder: “Home, whatever that may be?” The suggested answer is that the notion of home should perpetually be questioned and re-defined. Like the Man-Moth’s tear, Crusoe’s exile initially looks like poison but soon becomes some kind of elixir or even vital principle. In that perspective, Crusoe’s destiny may offer an illuminating synthesis of Bishop’s overall poetic course. Her closeness with the Crusoe she depicts may help us understand the lyricism she seems to celebrate at the end of her career in the short poem “Sonnet” (CP 192). Indeed, the sonnet stages a liberation (“caught”/ “freed”) and celebrates multiplicity, movement, travel and transitions through the symbolic figure of Mercury, continuous loss, evasion and transformation being once more claimed as a source of poetic freedom and creative growth.

Works cited

22Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.

23Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

24Bishop, Elizabeth. “Laureate’s Word of Acceptance,” World Literature Today 51 (winter 1977).

25Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

26Collot, Michel. La Poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon. Paris: PUF, 1989.

27Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

28Garnier-Giamarchi, Marie-Dominique. George Herbert, The Temple. Paris: Didier Erudition CNED, 1997.

29Goldensohn, Laurie. “The Body’s Roses: Race, Sex, and Gender in Elizabeth Bishop’s Representations of the Self,” in Marilyn May Lombardi, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993).

30Harrisson, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

31Monteiro George, ed. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

32O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Mystery and Manners, Occasional Prose. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.

33Stevens, Wallace. “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet.” In Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1996.

34Stevens, Wallace. “Effects of Analogy.” In Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1996.

35Tournier, Michel. Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.

36Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.