PEARL K. BELL
43
have that much energy.
One winter when it rained with biblical constancy for days on end,
she began reading Coleridge's letters and couldn't stop for the next six
weeks, as she reported, going through everything of his she had on hand.
During this interminable storm Elizabeth found herself alone in Samam–
baia for a few days - "alone" because Lota was away in
Rio,
but all the
servants were about, "and the toucan, who has a sore foot, and the cat
(who was being wormed) and the
roaring
waterfall - I feel as if I had
undergone a sort of Robinson Crusoe Experience." Indeed, before Co–
leridge had swept everything else away, she had been looking at Defoe's
novel (which she didn't much like). Though she did not write the great
poem "Crusoe in England" until many years later, it is tempting to
wonder if this was perhaps the moment when it began to take shape in
her imagination. (She often began writing a poem and then, as she once
remarked to an interviewer, it "just sat around"; in this case it may have
"sat around" for ten years.)
Some reckless speculation: was Brazil a kind of Cruscoe-island for
Elizabeth, the place where she had found refuge after too many ship–
wrecked years? Brazil, in its strangeness, its provincialism, its primitiveness?
Did Cruscoe's meditation about his island, once he was back in England,
begin with those rainy days of solitude in Samambaia? Was she remem–
bering those torrents when Crusoe, in the poem, longingly recalls the
distant barren island where he learned the brute lessons of survival - as
Elizabeth had learned them in Brazil?
My island seemed to be
a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere 's
left-over clouds arrived and hung
above the craters - their parched throats
were hot to touch.
Was that why it rained so much?
And why sometimes the whole place hissed?
Her letters were filled with the wildly operatic weather of the
mountains, where the rain seemed more drenching and clamorous, more
invasive than it was anywhere else.
One year Elizabeth was fascinated by a volume of selections from
Virginia Woolfs diaries, and she ruminated in a long letter that Woolf
