over birds and other animals. Where are other people?

Selkirk immediately answers this question in the second half of the first stanza:

O Solitude! where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms,
Than reign in this horrible place.

He is completely alone and miserable! He would rather live humbly in a place filled with anxiety and noise than rule over “this horrible place,” the island on which he is trapped.

Selkirk then expands on this theme of isolation by emphasizing what his life lacks: contact with mankind. He is “out of humanity’s reach” and yearns to hear the “sweet music of speech” from others. In fact, because he has no person with whom to speak and he has not heard another human talk in so long, he has become accustomed to silence. Therefore, when he does speak, he says, “I start at the sound of my own [voice].”

Although he is surrounded by nature and animals, he does not find comfort in them. He cannot converse with animals; they have become so used to him that they observe him with “indifference.” What he misses the most are

Society, Friendship, and Love
Divinely bestow'd upon man,
Oh had I the wings of a dove
How soon would I taste you again!

If he had the power to flee the island somehow—fly like a dove, since he cannot swim the distance to civilization—he would be able to experience social relationships, connections, and love, all of which he views as gifts from God. Having foolhardily commanded the captain to leave him on the island, in real life, the impetuous Selkirk regretted his actions when he realized that no other men were joining him on the island. Perhaps Selkirk is contrite and admits the errors of his juvenile ways when he says,

My sorrows I then might assuage
In the ways of religion and truth,
Might learn from the wisdom of age,
And be cheer'd by the sallies of youth.

The theme of loneliness and isolation is further emphasized by his poignant and futile desire to know how his loved ones are and if they even remember him. He wishes that the winds that batter him would

Convey to this desolate shore
Some cordial endearing report
Of a land I shall visit no more.
My friends, do they now and then send
A wish or a thought after me?
O tell me I yet have a friend,
Though a friend I am never to see.

Selkirk is quite self-pitying and fatalistic, as shown through hyperboles like “visit no more” and “never to see.” He laments that he has no friends and that his friends in his faraway, unattainable homeland may no longer think about him or his existence. Has his identity been erased? Is he “out of sight, out of mind” to others?

Cowper concludes the poem with Selkirk being pulled back to the grim reality of his situation after reminiscing about his “native land.” The sailor returns to his cabin to rest, reconciled to “his lot.”

Alexander Selkirk was a real person – a hot-headed Scottish privateer who, after an altercation with a young captain, begged to be dropped ashore on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile.  He immediately regretted his decision, but his captain never returned for him, leaving him to fend for himself for four years before he was rescued by a British vessel sailing through.  In this poem, Cowper draws from several written accounts of Selkirk’s predicament to interpret how the Scotsman must have felt during his time on the island.

The piece is permeated with bitter regret, as in the final lines of the first verse:  “Better dwell in the midst of alarms,/ Than reign in this horrible place.”  Selkirk reflects with sadness and despair on the simple pleasures of life among other humans, the “sweet music of speech,” and “Society, Friendship, and Love,” capitalized, you’ll notice, to emphasize their newfound importance in the mind of the castaway.  In the fourth verse he begs the winds to send him a rescue, and yet none arrive.  The hopelessness of his solitude settles around him.

The poem is, as a whole, an interpretation of the mental trials faced by Selkirk on his island, doomed and desperate with loneliness.  In the final verse, however, we are also reminded that man is strong enough to fight through these trials, and to yet survive, because “mercy…Gives even affliction a grace,/And reconciles man to his lot.”  Despite his bouts of despair Selkirk managed to survive on his island for years – he was, after all, most likely the inspiration of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  He did not let himself wither away to nothing for lack of companionship, for lack of hope – he persevered, and his story stands as an inspiration for more than just poets and writers.