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.”