The first poem to analyze is “Little Exercise” on page 101. In the poem Bishop describes a storm and various seaside scenes below it. The storm is compared by a simile to a dog looking for a place to sleep in. Bishop then describes the trees below the storm and how they are unresponsive to the lightning. Then under the trees she describes a heron responding to the falling rain that is shinin

g and surrounding the bird. She then moves to a boulevard with palm trees lining the sides of the roads and describes the relief the scene gets from being wet. Then the storm leaves in a series of “badly lit battle-scenes” which describes the lightning and its departure, as it seems to move to another part of the field below with each strike. Then in the last stanza she places the only human in the poem in a boat tied to a tree on the shore. This human represents the reader which is absorbing the storm through all senses, kind of like the reader is absorbing the storm with each line. She explains the rain as refreshing and by doing so the reader can easily see the rain as cleansing, which is a common theme for rain. The poem uses great imagery in “the little palm trees all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed as fistfuls of limp fish skeletons”, when the reader gets to this line one cannot help but to envision the lighting flashing and with each flash the trees violently whip in the wind only illuminated for seconds at a time. The poem’s main purpose is to put the reader in the middle of this furious storm but to do so with such great language that the storm in the readers mind is much more shocking than the one on the page.

The next poem of interest in the context of the rain theme is “Questions of Travel” on page 93. In this poem Bishop questions the legitimacy of travel and wonders if merely thinking of a place is just as well as physically being there. She opens the poem with a waterfall and describes it as being under “the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spil

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