Crusoe in England

“Crusoe in England” is a 12-stanza free-verse poem. Since Bishop inhabits the voice of Robinson Crusoe, a known literary figure, this work can be read as a persona poem. Persona poems assume the voice of someone else and can therefore also be called dramatic monologues. “Crusoe in England” does not conform to any traditional poetic forms, but Bishop maintains rough iambic meter throughout the work. Iambs are metrical rhythmic feet of two syllables where the first foot is unstressed and the second is stressed. The first two lines of “Crusoe in England,” for instance, are stressed as follows: “A new volcano has erupted / the papers say, and last week I was reading” (Lines 1-2). Other than the unstressed endings on both lines and the spondaic substitution, where both “week” and “I” are stressed in a single foot, these lines conform to iambic meter. The first line is in iambic trimeter because it has three feet, and the second line is in iambic pentameter.

Iambic pentameter is one of the most common meters in English literature, and it is associated with many older poetic forms such as the Shakespearean

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