Arrival at Santos

“Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop (1956)

This is one of Bishop’s more personal, autobiographical poems where she describes the relationship between herself and her grandmother. It uses third-person perspective to distance the speaker from the action. The formal use of the sestina structure, one of the most difficult and complicated forms of poetry, makes this poem technically impressive, but as some critics note, it also made the speaker seem even more distant. Like “Arrival at Santos” the speaker of this poem seems to be revealing emotion in a way that is restrained. Unlike in “Arrival at Santos” it reveals more autobiographical information than is typical of her other poems.

“Questions of Travel” by Elizabeth Bishop (1965)

As in “Arrival at Santos,” the speaker of this poem wrestles with the pleasures and the disappointments of travel. The speaker explores how her mind responds to waterfalls in Brazil, at first noting that there are too many of them, the way she notes her disappointment with the port of Santos. Then she asks a series of questions about why she chose to travel and what she expected to find, revealing that her sense of “home” is always uncertain. This piece extends many of the themes Bishop introduces in “Arrival at Santos” and expounds further upon them.

“Crusoe in England” by Elizabeth Bishop (1980)

This is one of Bishop’s longest poems, written in the persona of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe is the titular character of Daniel Defoe’s novel, a man who is shipwrecked alone on an island, where his only companion is a man he terms a “savage” named Friday. Through this persona, Bishop explores the feeling of being alone in an unfamiliar land. Like Crusoe, Bishop was a person from an English-speaking background living in a tropical environment where she also felt out of place.