BRIEF EXCHANGE ON ELIZABETH BISHOP’S POEM FILLING STATION

 Filling Station 

Elizabeth Bishop 

Oh, but it is dirty!

—this little filling station,

oil-soaked, oil-permeated

to a disturbing, over-all

black translucency.

Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,

oil-soaked monkey suit

that cuts him under the arms,

and several quick and saucy

and greasy sons assist him

(it’s a family filling station),

all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?

It has a cement porch

behind the pumps, and on it

a set of crushed and grease-

impregnated wickerwork;

on the wicker sofa

a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide

the only note of color—

of certain color. They lie

upon a big dim doily

draping a taboret

(part of the set), beside

a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?

Why the taboret?

Why, oh why, the doily?

(Embroidered in daisy stitch

with marguerites, I think,

and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

esso—so—so—so

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

R: 

The poem sounds rather snobbish up to that point, though wittily so. The poet is aware of her own snobbery, very self-conscious.  In the the last line the poet happily sees that people in the station also want beauty, and even if it is not hers, and the genial snobbery evaporates.  She is they and they are she, at least in this way.  The wittiness makes possible the quick transition.  If she wrote a truly snobbish poem her "conversion" would ring false.   

Take a look at Sylvia Plath's "Beggars" for a similar poem.  She sort of trashes the beggars and then admires them.  

Me:

A few thoughts:

Aren’t the first parts of the poem more than genial snobbery and not all that witty? Isn’t the speaker registering disgust, class superiority and harsh mockery?

But what goes on in the poem isn’t revelation but instead a kind of flowering or emerging consciousness. So the derisive question, “Do they live in the station?” is replaced in the second last stanza by genuine questions that import sincere wonder and the birth of some wider, more humane appreciation.

These questions open the door to seeing the small, loving acts described. They disarm the ridicule.

Except, the speaker doesn’t get sentimental. The movement in the poem is dialectical. The thesis is the opening disgust and ridicule. The antithesis is the emerging recognition of the necessity, value, care and humanity in what the family does. The synthesis contains the inner movement of a fuller appreciation of it rendered in the grounded and not-to-be-gainsaid reality of their works but still with a tinge of sardonicism:

…. Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

esso—so—so—so

to high-strung automobiles…

until capped off by an almost religious burst of feeling that subsumes any remaining sardonicism: “Somebody loves us all.”

I AND GROK IN A LONG BACK AND FORTH ON A LINE BY WALLACE STEVENS ON A POEM AS A *CRY* OF ITS OCCASION

Me: 

I have to reconstruct this:

I’d asked you (Grok) what you think of this:

“The more I look at Wallace Stevens’ “The poem is the cry of its occasion,” the more I like it. I like it a lot. I also like “Cry=short, expressive utterance in response to something or other.” But less.

Cry essentially means the spontaneous reaction to pain, grief, or distress. So, then, “cry out in happiness” overturns expectations. We do cry at occasions of joy, weddings, say, but as against the core meaning  of cry, crying out of happiness still feels paradoxical. Its force comes from that tension, joy sufficient to explode into a verb usually responsive to hurt.  

So, I stand by my criticism of Stevens’ line as a definition or a description of poetry.  Based on the above, here are two points:

1, “Cry” isn’t responsive to “something or other”. Its range is narrower than that. And poems range beyond cry’s range. 

2, “Cry” is necessarily marked by intensity. Poems are sometimes the intense expression of something. And sometimes not.

———

You (Grok) said:

I appreciate the precision you're bringing to this—it's a thoughtful pushback against Stevens' line, and it sharpens the discussion.

You're right that "cry" carries a primary connotation of distress or pain, and extending it to joy does create a productive tension (the kind that good metaphors thrive on). Stevens himself was a master of such overturnings, so he'd probably smile at the paradox you note.

But I think the line holds up better if we read "cry" less literally and more in the older, broader sense that Stevens likely intended: not just the wail of pain, but any sudden, involuntary vocal utterance that erupts because something demands it. Think of the biblical "cry" (as in "cry out to the Lord"), or even the "cry" of a hawk—sharp, unmediated, occasioned. In that register, "cry" isn't confined to grief; it's the voice breaking through because the occasion is too strong to stay silent.

Your two points are fair challenges:

1. On responsiveness: Stevens' "occasion" is indeed specific and pressing—"something or other" feels too casual by comparison. A poem isn't just any reaction; it's a reaction to a particular pressure of experience. But I don't think Stevens means the cry is indifferent or generic; rather, the poem doesn't exist in a vacuum—it is summoned by its moment. The occasion calls, the poem answers with its cry.

2. On intensity: This is the stronger objection. Many poems are quiet, meditative, ironic, or coolly observant—far from any sense of "cry." Yet even there, Stevens might argue that the poem's form and language still constitute a kind of utterance that the occasion uniquely elicits. The restraint itself can be the cry: think of the silences in late Stevens, or the understated precision of Bishop. The poem is still the voice the occasion requires, even if that voice is hushed.

So while "cry" risks overstating the emotional temperature of much poetry, it beautifully captures something essential: that a poem is not premeditated decoration or general wisdom—it's the sound experience makes when it forces language to speak right now, in this way, because nothing else would do.

I still like the line a lot. But your resistance to it helps me like it more carefully.

———

Me (now freshly after the reconstruction):

A few points:

On cry as “any sudden, involuntary vocal utterance that erupts because something demands it”, isn’t this too broad? For laughter fits it, so might a sigh, so might a whole range of utterances that reasonably can’t be thought of as a cry.

If cry therefore must be delimited, doesn’t cover all expressions, then mightn’t it be that your answer,

“I don't think Stevens means the cry is indifferent or generic; rather, the poem doesn't exist in a vacuum—it is summoned by its moment. The occasion calls, the poem answers with its cry.”

doesn’t follow? 

For if cry must have a constrained range, then to say a poem is the answer to that limitation and all poems are the cries of their occasions overlooks that particular poems, as you note in response to my above point 2, are not necessarily intense, an elemental part of a cry.

And then doesn’t this meet your response to my point 2 and your paragraph that follows it?

In a nutshell, if not every occasioned utterance is a cry, then to say a poem as a specific occasioned utterance is a cry, when clearly some poems aren’t intense expressions, contradicts cry’s  limits. 

—————

Grok:

You're raising a sharp and persistent challenge here—one that keeps circling back to the boundaries of "cry" and whether Stevens' metaphor can stretch to cover the full spectrum of poetry without snapping.

Yes, the broader sense I invoked ("any sudden, involuntary vocal utterance") risks being too capacious. Laughter erupts unbidden; a sigh escapes under pressure; even an "aha!" or a curse can feel compelled by the moment. If we let "cry" balloon to include all of those, it loses contour and becomes a synonym for "utterance" or "response," which drains the aphorism of its bite. Stevens isn't saying the poem is merely "the utterance of its occasion"—he's choosing a word with edge, with visceral force.

So you're right: to preserve that edge, "cry" must retain some constriction. It implies a threshold of urgency, a breaking-point where silence or ordinary speech won't suffice. The voice is wrenched out, not casually offered. Intensity—emotional, perceptual, linguistic—is baked in.

And that brings us directly to the contradiction you pinpoint.

If "cry" carries this necessary charge, then poems that operate in a cooler register—those that observe with detachment, that meander meditatively, that withhold rather than erupt—simply don't fit the metaphor. A Bishop poem that notes the minutiae of a filling station with quiet precision, or a late Stevens abstraction that drifts like "snow upon the desert's dusty face," isn't crying out. It's murmuring, or contemplating, or arranging language with deliberate restraint. The occasion may have summoned it, but the response isn't a cry; it's something more tempered, more constructed.

Your objection holds: not every occasioned utterance is a cry, and many poems are occasioned utterances that lack the intensity "cry" demands. To insist that even hushed or ironic poems are still "cries" (just very quiet ones) starts to feel like special pleading—like diluting the metaphor to save it.

Stevens' line works brilliantly for a certain kind of poetry: the Romantic surge, the confessional breakthrough, the modernist fragment that feels torn from the moment (think of "The Waste Land"'s jagged voices, or even Stevens' own "The Snow Man" with its stark, wintry apprehension). There, the poem really does feel like a cry compelled by its occasion.

But as a universal claim about what a poem *is*, it overreaches. Poetry also includes the crafted, the contemplative, the playful, the lapidary—modes where language is shaped over time, not cried out in the instant.

So I concede the point more fully than before. Stevens’ line is arresting and illuminating, but it's not definitive. It's a powerful partial truth—one that privileges the explosive, necessitated moment over the slower, more deliberate ones. Your resistance doesn't just refine appreciation of the line; it exposes its limits.

Thanks for pressing this so cleanly. It's made the discussion far richer.

POSSIBLY A BINARY-BREAKING POST ON WHETHER LIBERALISM OUGHT TO PROVIDE LIFE’S MEANING?

 Me:

What do you think of this response: 

“Maybe a binary-breaking thought not seen in these posts: common purpose aplenty arises from liberalism’s core premises, which provide for ordered liberty in our common lives, and, so, how we together live, thus providing space wherein we can seek to fulfill our deepest meanings.” 

to this: 

“Liberalism is actually *not supposed to* address the crisis of meaning that many people find in contemporary life, the idea is to address the political question of fair terms of social cooperation and you’re supposed to find your own source of meaning.”

—————————

Answer:

I think this proposed response is thoughtful, nuanced, and a strong counterpoint—potentially one of the better ones in a thread debating liberalism's role in modern existential or communal crises.

The original post captures a core insight from political liberalism (as in Rawls and similar thinkers): the political order is deliberately limited to securing fair, neutral terms of cooperation amid deep pluralism. 

It doesn't prescribe a comprehensive vision of the good life or directly supply "meaning"—that's left to individuals, communities, religions, philosophies, etc. 

This neutrality is meant to prevent coercion over ultimate questions of value, allowing diverse conceptions of meaning to flourish without state endorsement of one over others.

Your suggested reply doesn't deny that premise but pushes back elegantly: even within those neutral "core premises" (equal basic liberties, fair opportunity, rule of law, etc.), a shared framework emerges for "ordered liberty"—a structured way we live together that enables collective pursuits while protecting individual space. 

This creates "common purpose aplenty" not in some thick, imposed communal telos, but in the ongoing project of maintaining the conditions for peaceful, cooperative coexistence. 

It provides a public space where people can pursue their "deepest meanings" without constant fear of domination or conflict.

It's a "binary-breaking" idea because it avoids the false dichotomy often set up in these debates: either liberalism is atomizing and meaning-starved (the communitarian/post-liberal critique), or it's secretly imposing its own thick anthropology (the illiberal critique). 

Instead, it highlights how liberalism's thin proceduralism generates emergent commonality—enough shared purpose to hold society together, while leaving room for thicker meanings to fill private and associative life. 

If the thread's replies have mostly been polarized (e.g., "liberalism causes the meaning crisis!" vs. "no, that's the point—find your own!"), this injects subtlety and reconciliation. 

It's optimistic without being naive, and it defends liberalism's humility as a feature, not a bug.