Little Exercise, by Elizabeth Bishop

For Thomas Edwards Wanning

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,
shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment
when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees
all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed
as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard
and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack,
are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series
of small, badly lit battle-scenes,
each in “Another part of the field.”

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat
tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;
think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

* * *
The easiest way to avoid the meaning of this poem is to read it disobediently: don’t think, or don’t enter into what she suggests you consider. Then you’ll miss what she is trying to do.

And what is she asking you to think about? The particular effects of a storm. First you think about the storm itself as a dog, above. Then you think of the islands lying under the storm, suffering the storm or perhaps its approach, and the creatures in the storms reacting to the storm. Then you move to a town, a street in the storm and the sorry palm trees.

Then comes the pause: a striking statement because of its placing and the mood of the sentence: it is not an imperative but the first indicative, and yet how emphatic it is. All the rest has described thunder and lightning as far as the storm goes. At last comes the rain and with that a descent into details, into cracks, the effects of the storm on the town and on the sea. Apt—think about it!

Then it withdraws. The quotation is an allusion to Shakespeare (just Google it, you’ll see), Henry VI, under whom the state disintegrates and all his father’s gains are lost.

And then you come to the last stanza of Bishop’s poem: why this? or better, why this now? How can you think what she wants you to think? What has prepared you for this moment?