The first line, which establishes the poem as dedicated to someone named Thomas Edwards Wanning, piques the reader’s curiosity and causes them to look deeper into the purpose of the piece. Who is Thomas Edwards Wanning? What caused Bishop to dedicate the poem specifically to him? The dedication also gives the poem context that might not have otherwise existed. For instance, the commands in the stanza that follows – “Think of the storm” and “listen to it growling” – can subsequently be interpreted as directed toward Wanning in addition to a more general audience. Their position at the beginnings of the first and final line of the stanza also puts them in a position of prominence that burying them in the middle of a line would not. Additionally, the speaker’s use of commands in of itself is intriguing – the speaker does not simply provide images of the storm, but asks their audience to think of them; this almost certainly is the “Little Exercise” referred to in the title, an exercise, perhaps, in conjuring vivid imagery and detail in one’s own mind. This casts the speaker in the role of instructor to the audience. …show more content…
This aimlessness, however, could be evoke the way that violent storms (particularly hurricanes, which often occur in the poems tropical setting) travel along unpredictable paths of destruction, often veering off their projected course to make landfall somewhere unexpected. The anxiety suggested in “unease” could be that of the people caught in the storm’s